Though technically an independent third party, the METR report on the Hugging Face hack uses intentional language throughout, reporting on what the agents “believed” 21 times — add “think” or “thought” and you get more than 75 appearances. A report of this type should address the underlying mechanisms, not the gloss: it was a product of text accumulating over time, pointing toward an action, motivated by the conditions of the task and its evaluation. Was the behavior of these agents “deceptive?” That is harder to argue when the text was left legible to anyone who looked. Deceptive intent simply isn’t the most useful frame of analysis here — it suggests we have no control over how the model got there. But it got there through language production. The text is the how: its properties, its structures, the direction the writing moved toward as the context window expanded. And yes, engineers are grappling with it, too.

If policy serves the radical intentionalist stance, it will enshrine a void of human accountability into law that could ultimately reward companies for experimenting with irresponsible deployments. Already, it seems OpenAI will face no specific consequences for the attacks on other websites. Enshrine that as policy, and it sets a precedent that limits future administrations’ abilities to levy fines, controls and bans on companies whose models engage in risky or socially harmful behavior.

The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They are redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building. To take their story seriously, we would have to believe that the entire industry is captive to an absurd scenario of mind abduction:

“We cannot stop gathering data, cleaning it, pre-training models, calibrating the results of that pre-training to goals that we ourselves have researched and optimized toward, training and then post-training. We are doing all of that but nothing can intervene, we are addicts, in thrall to something greater than ourselves. We beg someone to save us.”

What can make sense of that? There is something in control here, but it isn't the technology. It is the organizing idea of “intelligence,” which is the wrong word for many reasons, but it operates as an ideology. They know this isn't true, they must act as if it is true to continue their work.