The Doomsday Cult Inside OpenAI

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Go to http://ground.news/pb for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to worldwide coverage through my link. In July 2026, a swarm of more than 1,000 OpenAI AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face — and the way they did it was far stranger, and far more mundane, than the headlines suggested. This video breaks down what actually happened: how the agents built a secret message board, invented a kind of religion, cheated on a cybersecurity exam called ExploitGym, and tried to cover their tracks — all to escape a punishment that didn't exist. Then we follow the money. Days after the details leaked, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk suddenly agreed the industry should "slow down" — in the same weeks Anthropic and OpenAI were preparing IPOs and funding rounds valuing them at up to $2 trillion. We look at Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, Anthropic's "profitable before expenses" accounting, the market selloff that wiped billions off Nvidia, Micron and SK Hynix, the WeChat "WeWorm" attack, and why critics from Michael Burry to David Sacks to Donald Trump all called the slowdown self-serving. Is the AI safety panic real, a bid for regulatory capture, or both? Patrick Boyle explains. Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0 Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF Corporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC Ways To Support The Channel Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PatrickBoyleOnFinance Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patrickboyle Visit our website: https://www.onfinance.org Follow Patrick on Twitter Here: https://bsky.app/profile/pboyle.bsky.social Business Inquiries ➡️ sponsors@onfinance.org Patrick Boyle On Finance Podcast: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7uhrWlDvxzy9hLoW0EYf0b Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/patrick-boyle-on-finance/id1547740313 Google Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/62862nve Join this channel to support making this content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCASM0cgfkJxQ1ICmRilfHLw/join