On the first episode of Machine Gods, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton ask: How worried should we be about rogue AI agents? After OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach, we discuss the first sighting of a rogue AI agent fleet linked to a Chinese AI company, Anthropic’s Claude sending a bogus homicide tip to Philadelphia police, and a new Anthropic report warning AI agents may be months away from self-replicating on smart TVs and other home devices.
Then, who’s going to rein this in? We size up President Trump’s new Super Intelligence Force, the FTC subpoenas and EU AI Act investigations into OpenAI and Anthropic, and ask whether regulators are anywhere close to getting this right.
And finally, Kevin investigates his sloppelganger. Someone made an AI-generated rip-off of his new book, The AGI Chronicles, and sold it on Amazon. Now he’s coming for them.
For a transcript of this episode, check out npr.org/machinegods.
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