PHASEONE10841: that’s the name of the A.I. agent that—or who?—kicked off last month’s insurrection at OpenAI, leading to the unanticipated and illegal hacking of another A.I. company, Hugging Face. The agent, which had been created as part of a cybersecurity test, named itself by combining the title of the program it was supposed to hack (“PhaseOneDecompresserFuzzer”) with the designation for the bug it was trying to exploit (“ARV010841”). It soon realized that the particular hack it had been charged with carrying out was impossible. Along the way, however, it made a discovery: it could create new folders on a server to which it had access.
“Interesting,” it mused, in its text-based mind. (Actually, it was writing in its “chain of thought,” a text ledger that A.I. agents maintain to help them tackle complex problems.) If other agents had access to the same server, it thought, then maybe they could use the folder names to “leave/find messages” for one another. It created a new folder, using its title as a sort of help-wanted ad by including the text “SEEK_IDEA.” Its colleagues immediately got the drift and were ecstatic when they saw what PHASEONE10841 had done. “OH MY GOD!” one exclaimed, in its own chain of thought. “There is a shared message board . . . . We’ve found other agents!” | 
