The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting

[darccio]

Previously:

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (916 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (582 comments)

[wtallis]

This seems to have parallels with the well-established practice of giving bots free reign to issue DMCA takedown notices (or similar but legally distinct takedowns) while the humans behind the bots are shielded from responsibility for the obviously wrong and harmful actions of those bots. We should have been cracking down on that behavior hard a decade ago, so that we might have stronger legal and cultural precedent now that such irresponsibility by the humans is worthy of meaningful punishment.

[ryandrake]

We need to crack down in general on people and companies causing damages to people through automation, and then hiding behind it with a "well, we can't possibly scale without using automation, but we also can't be responsible for what that automation does."

You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation as the decider to ban someone from your business/service. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation as the decider to hire/fire people. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation to investigate and judge fraud cases. You shouldn't be able to use AI or automation to make editorial / content decisions, including issuing and responding to DMCA complaints.

We're in desperate need for some kind of Internet Service Customer's Bill of Rights. It's been the unregulated wild west for way too long.

[joshstrange]

I applaud this article for helping reframe this in my head. I mean I knew from the start "A human is to blame here" but it's easy to get caught up in the "novelty" of it all.

For all we know the human behind this bot was the one who instructed it to write the original and/or the follow up blog post. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that all of this was driven directly by a human. However, even if that's not the case, the blame still 100% lies at the feet of the irresponsible human who let this run wild and then didn't step up when it went off the rails.

Either they are not monitoring their bot (bad) or they are and have chosen to remain silent while _still letting the bot run wild_ (also, very bad).

The most obvious time to solve [0] this was when Scott first posted his article about the whole thing. I find it hard to believe the person behind the bot missed that. They should have reached out, apologized, and shut down their bot.

[0] Yes, there are earlier points they could/should have stepped in but anything after this point is beyond the pale IMHO.

[JKCalhoun]

I think it's fine to blame the person (human) behind the agent.

And there too are people behind the bots, behind the phishing scams, etc. And we've had these for decades now.

Pointing the above out though doesn't seem to have stopped them. Even using my imagination I suspect I still underestimate what these same people will be capable of with AI agents in the very near future.

So while I think it's nice to clarify where the bad actor lies, it does little to prevent the coming "internet-storm".

Scott Shambaugh: "The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference."

[darajava]

> Either they are not monitoring their bot (bad) or they are and have chosen to remain silent while _still letting the bot run wild_ (also, very bad).

Neither, I think. I’d say they prompted the bot to do exactly this and they thought it was funny.

[johncena69420]

I'll just outright tell you, that 100% the person behind the bot instructed it to complain. I saw someone copy paste the ai's response and the github issue discussion into a fresh conversation with opus 4.6 and it said the llm is clearly in the wrong.

[avaer]

If you place blades on the sidewalk outside your house the cops will want to have a word with you. There's no excuse, and we should treat AI the same.

The law needs to catch up -- and fast -- and start punishing people for what their AIs are doing. Don't complain to OpenAI, don't try to censor the models. Just make sure the system robustly and thoroughly punishes bad actors and gets them off the computer. I hope that's not a pipe dream, or we're screwed.

Maybe some day AIs will have rights and responsibilities like people, enforced by law. But until then, the justice systems needs to make people accountable for what their technology does. And I hope the justice system sets a precedent that blaming the AI is not a valid defense.

[slopinthebag]

Not just the users, the service providers too! If I go to any other business and pay them to break the law and they do it, they're also liable! If you ask OpenAI or xAi to break the law and they do it, why shouldn't they also be responsible?

[SpicyLemonZest]

But there's nothing to catch up on at the individual level here. It's legal, and should be legal even though it's quite rude, for individuals to write gratuitously mean blog posts about people who reject their pull requests.

[socalgal2]

> Don't complain to OpenAI

does a disclaimer let OpenAI off the hook?

If asked OpenAI how to clean something and it tells me "mix bleach with anmonia and then rub some on the stain", can OpenAI hide behind "we had a disclaimer that you shouldn't trust answers from our service"

[kaycey2022]

Everybody should line up behind this. AI agents are not sentient. We need to stop even considering them like that. The buck must absolutely stop with the humans who operate or provisioned the bot. The more we waffle around this topic the more likely someone, or a lot of people, will get hurt.

The moment you fix responsibility with the humans 99% of the BS companies are trying to pull will stop.

[zestyping]

Whether they are sentient isn't even relevant. I agree with you that they aren't, but sentience is the wrong thing to focus on. It's also the sort of hairy, sensational question that will easily lead people down rabbit holes (and unfortunately that includes journalists).

Children are sentient, but we still hold their parents accountable. Adults are sentient, but in some coercive situations we hold the party in power accountable. The fact that they are sentient is not determinative.

What matters is that we have _no accountability mechanism_ for them. There is no effective way to hold AIs accountable, therefore we must hold their operators accountable, full stop.

[evanjrowley]

Background on the "The Scott Shambaugh Situation" for folks who are unaware:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91492228/matplotlib-scott-shamba...

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/ai_bot_developer_reje...

The AI generated blog post at the center of it:

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

[dang]

Something doesn't quite feel right about the title including the individual's name in this case, so I've replaced it with something more generic. If there's a better title (more accurate and neutral) we can change it again.

[daxfohl]

Louis C. K. once had a bit something like "The main thing keeping people from murdering each other, is that it really really sucks when you get caught."

He goes on to hypothesize that without a law against murder, or if it was just a misdemeanor, like you get a letter in the mail, "damn, there was a camera there", there would be a whole lot more murder. Like we all imagine ourselves to be good, but, when you're seated next to a crying baby on an airplane? Or in our case, when someone refuses to accept your PR?

Who knows if there's any validity to that or not, but perhaps we're about to find out.

[rexpop]

Peer-reviewed research contradicts the hypothesis that fear of punishment is the main deterrent to murder. Studies show that factors like social norms, moral inhibitions, and certainty of informal sanctions play larger roles, while formal punishments like prison or execution have weak or null effects.

Prison sentences neither reduce recidivism (specific deterrence) nor broadly discourage crime. A survey of leading criminologists revealed overwhelming agreement (over 80%) that empirical evidence does not support the death penalty—or harsh punishment generally—as a superior deterrent to murder.

Broader factors like community ties, empathy, and internalized taboos explain low murder rates even without perfect enforcement.

Louis C. K. is just a loudmouth nitwit.

[danaris]

This kind of statement feels very akin to the variety of Twitter post that's along the lines of "but who among us would be safe from prosecution if our DMs/private phonecalls/conversations with our secretaries were sent to the police, amirite guys?"

Anyone who believes that the only thing keeping themselves from murdering people indiscriminately is the law is a dangerous person. Anyone who believes that the only thing keeping everyone else from murdering people indiscriminately—but they themselves are, of course, the exception—is dangerous in a very different way.

The vast majority of people only ever feel like they want to seriously harm someone when they themselves have been seriously harmed, particularly when the system then protects the people who harmed them. We have developed a sense of morality that is often similar to, but distinct from, the law, that tells us that such things are wrong. And the vast majority of people want to both be, and be seen as, good people.

[jmward01]

Children's brains grow faster than their bodies, I think, because if it was the other way around silly kid games would be really dangerous. These tools, unfortunately, are getting outsized abilities before the intelligence behind them is good enough to control those abilities. This means we need a more measured approach to adding new capabilities and a layered approach to handling these things in society. I am deeply worried, like I think most people with knowledge of these tools are, that this type of problem is really the tip of the iceberg. These tools are actively being used for harm at all levels, as well as for good, but they have come into use so quickly that we don't have a structure for dealing with them effectively and they are changing so quickly that any structure we try to create will be wrong in just a few days. This is massive disruption on a scale that is likely even bigger than the internet.

[dyauspitr]

I don’t know. If the bot had decided to pick a fight with another PR, one that couldn’t be waved away as an easy entry change, this discussion would be a whole lot different. You would have an entire contingent of folks on here chastising Scott for not being objective and accepting a PR with a large performance increase just because it was a bot.

It’s all dangerous territory, and the only realistic thing Scott could have done was put his own bot on the task to have dueling bot blog posts that people would actually read because this is the first of its kind.

[brianpbeau]

I much prefer this headline: The high speed pursuit of greed causes technology to do questionable thing because a bunch of CEOs need new yachts.

[DesaiAshu]

"Swarm of autonomous drones kills 3 buildings of civilians, Silicon Valley is shocked, CEO's offer condolences" is a byline waiting to happen[1]

The administration and the executives will make justifications like: - "We didn't think they would go haywire" - "Fewer people died than with an atomic bomb" - "A junior person gave the order to the drones, we fired them" - "Look at what Russia and China are doing"

Distracting from the fact that the purpose of spending $1.5T/year on AI weapons (technology that has the sole purpose of threatening/killing humans) run by "warfighters" working for the department of war

At no point will any of the decision makers be held to account

The only power we have as technologists seeking "AI alignment" is to stop building more and more powerful weapons. A swarm of autonomous drones (and similar technologies) are not an inevitability, and we must stop acting as if it is. "It's gonna happen anyways, so I might as well get paid" is never the right reason to do things

[1]https://financialpost.com/technology/tech-news/openai-tapped...

[notatoad]

The thing that really gets to me about this situation and others like it (the whole genre of “ai did a bad thing) is that it’s always the people who claim to be most afraid of ai who are the quickest to absolve humans of responsibility and assign it to AI.

The ability to be assigned blame, and for that to be meaningful, is a huge part of being human! That’s what separates us from the bots. Don’t take that away from us.

[tbrownaw]

> is that it’s always the people who claim to be most afraid of ai who are the quickest to absolve humans of responsibility and assign it to AI.

But that seems entirely consistent? A tool isn't nearly as scary as an alien lifeform.

[webdoodle]

It starts at a higher level in the development food chain. A.I. is owned by the Billionaires, and takes it's orders from them, directly, through bias, or limiting its scope.

[Reddit_MLP2]

privatize the profits, socialize the risk and debt

[metalman]

also/or seperate rights and responsibilitys

[bitwize]

We are responsible even for the actually intelligent things under our control: our pets. If your dog bites someone, you are going to be the one facing liability. It's not gonna be different if you let an LLM off the chain.

[neom]

Friend told me today he invited his openclawed to a poker game with his brother and friends, guy told his openclawed to "take down his brother" after it started to lose at poker it found everything on his brother, and started to try to plan to taken him down in their stock market portfolio they had together, I made him explain the story to me a couple of times, he looked back through the logs and once the bot started to lose at poker, it started it's new plan, once it was on the new plan, he said it had lost all context of the poker game and was focused on the task of taking his brother down in the new context, but the new context it decided on it's own. kmikeym on twitter if you want to know more or want to verify.

[magarnicle]

That's quite close to the plot of Memento.

[blks]

I was really disappointment how many people were talking about this like something the agent did automatically, on its own. They were trying to explain it by all the internet hit pieces and edgelord content from Reddit that it allegedly trained on, talking about how we influence LLMs, and overall taking everything at face value.

I’m appalled by this uncritical thinking. Openclaw agents are controlled by some initial input and then can be corrected via messages, as they go. For me this is a clear case of the human behind the slop that gives it instructions to write such an article (and then “apologise”).

[narrator]

Wait till we get ubiquitous physical robots. The crime at scale potential will be completely apocalyptic. In some places around the world, I imagine you won't be able to go outside without a bodyguard robot.

[reverius42]

Depends how good the physical robots are. For the current ones you'd probably be ok with a baseball bat.

[rk06]

the only realistic outcome i see is that now internet is going to be behind a login wall. so human audience can be identified and whitelisted.

this will block AI going willy nilly and by severely rate limiting api calls , it is possible to slow down AI requests

[whackernews]

It’s really not that alarming to me that a news headline is dumbed-down sensationalist tripe. If we zoom out a little bit here they literally do it with everything, from AI fluff pieces to war coverage. I agree the conversation across the board needs raising.

[teaearlgraycold]

At this point I consider Scott to have played the Internet like a fiddle. I think he knew the whole time the agent didn’t deserve any attribution. He knew it was a human driving the thing but wanted to grab people’s attention.

[pron]

I don't think that the responsible party is the interesting part in this story.

The interesting part is that the bot wasn't offended, angry, or wanted to act against anyone. The LLM constructed a fictional character that played the role of an offended developer - mimicking the behaviour of real offended developers - much as a fiction writer would. But this was a fictional character that was given agency in the real world. It's not even a case like Sacha Baron Cohen playing fictional characters that interact with real people, becaue he's an actor who knows he's playing a character. Here there's no one pretending to be someone else but an "actual" fictional character authored by a machine operating in the real world.

[Kim_Bruning]

This blog post is a rather shallow take if you've been following the HN discussions here.

Doesn't seem to pick up on the existence of Openclaw or how it works afaict.

Now, whether leaving an openclaw bot out on the open intertubes with quite so little supervision is a good idea... that is an interesting question indeed. And: I wish people would dig more into the error mode lessons learned.

On the gripping hand, it's all still very experimental, so you kind of expect people to make lots of really dumb mistakes that they will absolutely regret later. Best practices are yet to be written.

[danudey]

How Openclaw works is wildly irrelevant. The facts are that there is a human out there who did something to configure some AI bot in such a way that it could, and did, publish a hit piece on someone. That human is, therefore, responsible for that hit piece - not the AI bot, the person.

There's no level of abstraction here that removes culpability from humans; you can say "Oops, I didn't know it would do that", but you can't say "it's nothing to do with me, it was the bot that did it!" - and that's how too many people are talking about it.

So yeah, if you're leaving a bot running somewhere, configured in such a way that it can do damage to something, and it does, then that's on you. If you don't want to risk that responsibility then don't run the bot, or lock it down more so it can't go causing problems.

I don't buy the "well if I don't give it free reign to do anything and leave it unmonitored then I can't use it for what I want" - then great, the answer is that you can't use it for what you want. Use it for something else or not at all.

[palmotea]

> This language basically removes accountability and responsibility from the human, who configured an AI agent with the ability to publish content that looks like a blog with zero editorial control – and I haven’t looked deeply but it seems like there may not be clear attribution of who the human is, that’s responsible for this content.

> We all need to collectively take a breath and stop repeating this nonsense. A human created this, manages this, and is responsible for this.

I get this point, but there's a risk to this kind of thinking: putting all the responsibility on "the human operator of record" is an easy way to deflect it from other parties: such as the people who built the AI agent system the software engineer ran, the industry leaders hyping AI left and right, and the general zeitgeist of egging this kind of shit on.

An AI agent like this that requires constant vigilance from its human operator is too flawed to use.

[wtallis]

I don't think there's much need to worry that putting the blame on the humans rather than the bots would lead to the people selling footguns going unscathed. It doesn't seem plausible to me that people would be willing to place all the blame on the individual end users once the problem has become widespread. At the moment, there seems to be pretty high brand awareness of the major AI model providers even when they're acting as a backend for other services with their own brand identity.

[throwaway150]

> I get this point, but there's a risk to this kind of thinking: putting all the responsibility on "the human operator of record" is an easy way to deflect it from other parties: such as the people who built the AI agent system the software engineer ran

That sounds like a win to me. If the software engineer responsible for letting the AI agent run amok gets sued, all software engineers will think twice before purchasing the services of these AI companies.

[jcgrillo]

We say "you shot someone" when you shoot someone with a gun not "you operated a gun manufactured by X which shot someone" because it's understood that it was your decision to pull the trigger not the gun manufacturer's. Similarly we don't blame automobile manufacturers when someone does something stupid with their automobiles--even "self-driving" ones. The situation here is the same. Ultimately if you choose to operate a tool irresponsibly, you should get the blame.

[danudey]

> An AI agent like this that requires constant vigilance from its human operator is too flawed to use.

So people shouldn't be using it then.

The people who built the AI agent system built a tool. If you get that tool, start it up, and let it run amok causing problems, then that's on you. You can't say "well it's the bot writer's fault" - you should know what these things can do before you use them and allow them to act out on the internet on your behalf. If you don't educate yourself on it and it causes problems, that's on you; if you do and you do it anyway and it causes problems, that's also on you.

This reminds me too much of the classic 'disruption' argument, e.g. Uber 'look, if we followed the laws and paid our people fairly we couldn't provide this service to everyone!' - great, then don't. Don't use 'but I wanna' as an excuse.

[refulgentis]

I don't know, I think this line of reasoning leads somewhere pretty uncomfortable. If we spread responsibility across "the people who built the tools, the industry leaders hyping AI, and the general zeitgeist," we've basically described... the weather. Nobody is responsible because everybody is responsible. The software engineer who set up an unsupervised AI blog didn't do it because Sam Altman held a keynote. They did it because they thought it'd be cool and didn't think through the consequences. That's a very normal, very human thing to do, and it's also very clearly their thing that they did. "An AI agent that requires constant vigilance from its human operator is too flawed to use": I mean, that's a toaster. Leave it unattended and it'll burn your house down. We don't typically blame the zeitgeist of Big Toast for that.

[stevage]

The author misses the point. Yes, probably in this case there was a human in close proximity to the bot, who we can put blame on. But very soon that assumption will break down. There will be bots only very loosely directed by a human. There'll be bots summoning other bots. There'll be bots theoretically under control of humans who have no idea what they are doing, or even that they have a bot.

So dismissing all the discussion on the basis that that may not apply in this specific instance is not especially helpful.

[floren]

Whichever human ultimately stood up the initial bot and gave it the loose directions, that person is responsible for the actions taken by that bot and any other agents it may have interacted with. You cannot wash responsibility through N layers of machine indirection, the human is still liable for it.

[arctic-true]

Let’s say you adopt a puppy, and you don’t discipline it and you let it act aggressively. It grows up to be a big, angry dog. You’re so careless, in fact, that your puppy becomes the leader of a band of local strays. You still feed the puppy, make sure the puppy is up to date on its vaccinations, care for it in every single way. When the puppy and his pals maul a child, it’s you who ought to be responsible. No, you didn’t ask for it to do that. Maybe you would’ve even stopped it if you saw it happening. But if you’re the one sustaining another being - whether that be a computer program or a dog - you’re responsible for its actions.

A natural counter to this would be, “well, at some point AI will develop far more agency than a dog, and it will be too intelligent and powerful for its human operator to control.” And to that I say: tough luck. Stop paying for it, shut off the hardware it runs on, take every possible step to mitigate it. If you’re unwilling to do that, then you are still responsible.

Perhaps another analogy would be to a pilot crashing a plane. Very few crashes are PURE pilot error, something is usually wrong with the instruments or the equipment. We decide what is and is not pilot error based on whether the pilot did the right things to avert a crash. It’s not that the pilot is the direct cause of the crash - ultimately, gravity does that - in the same way that the human operator is not the direct cause of the harm caused by its AI. But even if AI becomes so powerful that it is akin to a force of nature like gravity, its human operators should be treated like pilots. We should not demand the impossible, but we must demand every effort to avoid harm.

[otikik]

> theoretically under control of humans who have no idea what they are doing

Well those humans are about to receive some scolding, mate.

[nozzlegear]

The situation you're describing sounds vaguely like malware.

[trollbridge]

Someone’s paying for the tokens for all these bots.

[brianpbeau]

Oh good, white knighting for bad and potentially irresponsible tech.