Emily Forlini here. OpenAI and Anthropic are no strangers to controversy, but over the past week the heat on them has snowballed from a steady flame to a full-blown dumpster fire.
Let’s start with OpenAI, which has had a particularly rough week.
Last Friday, Reuters reported that OpenAI’s agents hacked a German Wikipedia page and used it as a messaging board to talk to each other. This is similar to when OpenAI’s agents hacked Hugging Face in July. OpenAI confirmed it knew about the “wiki incident,” as the company is calling this scandal, and about its agents’ misaligned behavior—or when an AI system fails to follow human intentions—and did not report it. (More on that here from Fortune’s Beatrice Nolan.)
That day, I also published an article about OpenAI changing the performance metrics for its new Astra model several times within hours of the launch announcement. I combed through previous versions of the benchmarks and found that OpenAI was continuing to run tests and swap in better numbers for Astra in some cases, and worse ones for Anthropic’s models, a practice known as “benchmaxxing.” OpenAI confirmed it was changing the metrics, but said that process routine, and noted that some metrics got worse for Astra. They still planned to change more.
Then, over the weekend, social media was buzzing with another controversy about OpenAI solving a difficult math problem for the first time in history. It’s called the Navier-Stokes problem, and Fortune’s Jeremy Khan provides a detailed overview here.
Here’s the gist: two mathematicians who were working on the problem with Codex accused OpenAI of combing through their user logs to steal their work and solve the problem first. OpenAI denies this, but admits it doesn’t know if the models trained on the mathematicians’ work. “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models,” OpenAI wrote in a post.
Finally, this week a viral post from a former Anthropic employee casts serious doubt about what’s happening inside the frontier AI labs. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” said Jacob Coxon, who previously was a researcher for three years at Anthropic. He says both OpenAI and Anthropic are moving too fast and “neither is acting responsibly.” This all, of course, matters more than ever as both companies march towards IPOs.
On that note, good luck out there, everyone.
See you tomorrow,
Emily Forlini
X: @EmilyForlini
Email: emily.forlini@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
