News Media Is Underplaying Risks of Rogue AI Agent Swarms

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison might have a career as a newspaper editor if this whole payments thing doesn't work out. His weekend X post expressing “surprise at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack” was spot on. While there’s no doubt the attack has had some coverage, the details—as laid out in an independent inquiry report last week—are so alarming you’d think the news media would have gone crazy over it.

Instead, reporters are still obsessed with the public opposition to data centers. That’s an important story, for sure, but the dangers of AI are a much bigger one. After all, just imagine how the public would react if a swarm of AI agents worked together to hack a bank and steal depositors’ money? There’d be riots in the streets and a run on the unaffected banks. And judging from the detailed report, that scenario is quite possible.