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.