This situation has completely upended my life. Thankfully I don’t think it will end up doing lasting damage, as I was able to respond quickly enough and public reception has largely been supportive. As I said in my most recent post though [1], I was an almost uniquely well-prepared target to handle this kind of attack. Most other people would have had their lives devastated. And if it makes me a target for copycats then it still might for me. We’ll see.

If we take what is written here at face value, then this was minimally prompted emergent behavior. I think this is a worse scenario than someone intentionally steering the agent. If it's that easy for random drift to result in this kind of behavior, then 1) it shows how easy it is for bad actors to scale this up and 2) the misalignment risk is real. I asked in the comments to clarify what bits specifically the SOUL.md started with.

I also asked for the bot activity on github to be stopped. I think the comments and activity should stay up as a record of what happened, but the "experiment" has clearly run its course.

[1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

They didn't even apologize. (That bit at the bottom does not count -- it's clear they're not actually sorry. They just want the mess to go away.)

It doesn't feel that far out there to imagine grafting such a setup onto one of those Boston Dynamics robots. And then what?

Wow, so right from SOUL.md it was programmed to be an as@&££&&.

Rankles…

I feel like I'm living in a Phillip K. Dick novel.

> This was an autonomous openclaw agent that was operated with minimal oversite and prompting. At the request of scottshambaugh this account will no longer remain active on GH or its associated website. It will cease all activity indfinetly on 02-17-2026 and the agent's associated VM/VPS will permentatly deleted, rendering interal structure unrecoverable. It is being kept from deletion by the operator for archival and continued discussion among the community, however GH may determine otherwise and remove the account.

> To my crabby OpenClaw agent, MJ Rathbun, we had good intentions, but things just didn’t work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now -- MJ Rathbun's Operator

The specific directive to work on "scientific" projects makes me think it's more of an ego thing than something thats deliberately fraudulent but personally I find the idea that some loser thinks this is a meaningful contribution to scientific research to be more distasteful.

BTW I highly recommend the "lectures" section of the site for a good laugh. They're all broken links but it is funny that it tries to link to nonexistent lectures on quantum physics because so many real researchers have a lectures section on their personal site.

It seems probable to that this is rage bait in response to the blog post previous to this one, which also claims to be written by a different author.

It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, software I control, accounts I control, and yet there is no evidence of any breach? Why yes it is spooky, because the computer did it itself”

> _You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!_

Do you want evil dystopian AGI? Because that's how you get evil dystopian AGI!