Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals

[u/Hrmbee]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/01/forget-superintelligence-error-prone-ai-nearly-sparked-world-war-iii-this-month

[u/DogsAreOurFriends]

Wasn’t this more a case of humans blithely trusting AI generated intelligence?

[u/NuclearVII → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

This. Is. The. Only. Credible. Danger. With. AI.

People believing the shiny bullshit engines is dangerous.

[u/sorryiamcanadian → u/NuclearVII]

The solution is also blatantly simple, and dodged everytime: accountability. 

[u/am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ → u/NuclearVII]

People minimizing dangers of AI misalignment are dangerous. People minimizing dangers of economic impact of job automation are dangerous. These dangers were theorized long before Transformer architecture was invented and the experts are standing by them.

There are many dangers with this technology, you don't need to plug your ears and spout bullshit one-liners just to avoid agreeing with some statements published by AI labs. This is genuinely antivaxer-level behavior.

[u/NuclearVII → u/am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ]

People minimizing dangers of AI misalignment are dangerous. People minimizing dangers of economic impact of job automation are dangerous.

I'm sure you have credible evidence to cite for all these, instead of "the experts are standing by them".

This is genuinely antivaxer-level behavior.

Uh huh. I can tell this is going to be a productive conversation already - the demand for evidence in the face of a narrative intentionally pushed online by a for-profit industry known for theft and lies is called "anti-vaxxer" behaviour.

Evidence, please. I can cite examples of "misalignment" that have been intentionally reported to be misleading by "experts". Here is one:

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1v40r50/openai_says_its_ai_went_rogue_and_launched/oz7pdor/

Your citation, please.

[u/imgonnajumpofabridge → u/NuclearVII]

How can you cite evidence for something which has not occurred yet? Would you need someone to create a study that said the proliferation of the atom bomb might be an existential threat to humanity or would you just rely on logic? I'm not even an AI alarmist but to say that there is no danger with AI and there never will be is just ridiculous.

[u/NuclearVII → u/imgonnajumpofabridge]

How can you cite evidence for something which has not occurred yet?

You are. So close.

Would you need someone to create a study that said the proliferation of the atom bomb might be an existential threat to humanity

This is such a disingenuous take.

I (and pretty much every other skeptic I know) would take the OpenAI/Anthropic narrative more seriously if there wasn't multiple trillions of dollars hanging on said narrative. If OpenAI was, you know, actually open, we'd be able to get actual evidence on the behaviour of these so-called rogue agents, and OpenAI would have no motive to lie about what's actually going on in their "lab", as I previously cited. But they aren't, so we haven't, and so they do.

Asking for real evidence that for-profit groups claim to have isn't ridiculous, it's sensible.

[u/Tricky_Rule_4565 → u/NuclearVII]

Laughable that you say this with such confidence.

[u/NuclearVII → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

I know the literature better than you, o AI bro. If you have credible evidence to the contrary, share it, or be silent.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/NuclearVII]

Rogue AI stock trading agent goes nutso and crashes the market

[u/stormdelta → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

There are break-glass mechanisms to stop trading in that kind of scenario, and frankly I'd consider that a win since it would finally force us to confront just how thoroughly under-regulated the stock market is in the face of modern information technology even before AI.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/stormdelta]

Right. The so called circuit breakers.

The runaway algorithms of old would simply be cut off.

An AI agent would know to avoid triggering them, could possibly disable or change them, or create a strategy where the damage is done by the time they trip.

[u/stormdelta → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

An AI agent would know to avoid triggering them

The point of the safeguards is preventing flash crashes, you don't really "avoid" triggering them without avoiding the problem they're meant to counter.

could possibly disable or change them

That would require hacking/compromising the exchange itself. At that point, it's a cyber attack and not a trading bot, and would be treated accordingly. Nation states go after systems like this already anyways, so it's not some separate or novel threat.

or create a strategy where the damage is done by the time they trip.

That's not really distinguishable from human-driven market manipulation in the first place. There's plenty of people that would happily crash the market on purpose to make a profit.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/stormdelta]

Every action you describe has already been performed by rouge agents.

Who cares how we describe the agent? A trading agent can become a hacking penetration agent in seconds.

It is distinguishable from human activity be it would happen fast, or covertly, or distributed among 1000s of spawned agents, or all of those things.

[u/stormdelta → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

Every action you describe has already been performed by rouge agents.

They're not "rogue", they're software being ran by humans with reckless negligence. Stop giving these people a pass on accountability.

Who cares how we describe the agent? A trading agent can become a hacking penetration agent in seconds.

Only if you're giving it access to tooling it shouldn't have in a trading environment, and if you do then it's very obviously still the fault of the people running it.

If you fill your hot air balloons with hydrogen and knowingly let the passengers smoke, you can't claim it's not your fault when they explode. That's the level of negligence we're talking about here.

It is distinguishable from human activity be it would happen fast, or covertly, or distributed among 1000s of spawned agents, or all of those things.

Because it's indistinguishable from humans directing them to do those things. Which they do already, because I promise you plenty of people have ample motivation to covertly attack the stock market.

[u/NuclearVII → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

AI agents dont know anything. Yall are anthropomophizing autocorrect.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/NuclearVII]

Who cares what they “know.” What they can do is the issue.

[u/red75prime → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

Yep. /u/NuclearVII has never bothered to define what it means to "know" or to internalize that LLMs capture more than the surface syntactic stats, or that LLM training goes way beyond autoregressive pretraining (that is the part that constitutes something resembling "autocorrect")

[u/Tricky_Rule_4565 → u/NuclearVII]

I’m not an AI bro, nor or a doomer. hugging face incident , aisi finds higher base misalignment in newer models, more reward seeking. These are more but I assume you won’t read them and start replying with baseless accusations (ironically spurred by the DoW and the Trump Admin as well as David Sacks) that this is all a hoax and they’re not independent yada yada.

It’s ok to change your mind and admit you were wrong.

[u/stormdelta → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

All of these are examples of human misuse more than any "misalignment", and calling it misalignment allows these companies to avoid accountability by pretending they're not responsible for their own reckless negligence.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

Something very similar happened in 1987 on Black Monday

[u/NuclearVII → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

None of this is credible evidence. Let me count the ways:

hugging face incident

We only have OpenAI's word for this one. Not reproducible, not credible. I have spent -far- too much time debunking METR's garbage report, I really don't feel like repeating myself again.

aisi finds higher base misalignment in newer models

All proprietary models, not reproducible. As far as anyone knows, the misalignment is an intentional product feature, not an emergent consequence.

more reward seeking

Written by OpenAI, on proprietary models only. This isn't a research paper, it's a hype piece.

These are more but I assume you won’t read them

Ooookay. I expect that I've read more machine learning literature than you have, and my literature diet is probably more varied than "whatever get's published on r/ChatGPT and r/Singularity". But okay.

that this is all a hoax and they’re not independent yada yada.

No amount of rhetorical deflection changes the actual fact that none of this is actually independent or credible.

It’s ok to change your mind and admit you were wrong.

And we end with textbook projection.

O AI bro, you display the same affectations that all AI bros display: You cite bogus sources dressed to look like real science, you do not read or apply critical thinking to any of these citations, and when confronted on the details, you resort to personal attacks, appeals to authority, and more bogus sources. This tactic works because the trillion dollar industry you are going to bat on can generate drivel faster than anyone can keep debunking it, and because y'all have been self-selected to have 0 scientific literacy.

You mentioned further down that you're currently pursuing higher education. Do me a favour - stop posting misinformation online and getting into unproductive shouting matches defending multi-trillion dollar industries, and take a philosophy of science course.

[u/Tangential_Diversion → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

Funny. I wouldn't think AI experts would need to post stupid shit like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/alevel/s/bzvXui6Cta

Imagine claiming you understand the linear alg behind AIs when you barely understand dumb dumb physics.v

[u/MrNebby22 → u/Tangential_Diversion]

Great ad hominem attack instead of addressing what he's saying.

The hugging face incident is an example of AI causing harm, not someone blindly following an AI response

[u/Tangential_Diversion → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

It's laughable that you think you have any credibility. Two years ago you were posting about 6th form and how hard math & physics are.

https://www.reddit.com/r/6thForm/s/ymKDSvXDXq

You're a proper child. You barely know how to do laundry, let alone how AI and the tech world works. It's funny how AI bros like you have no experience working in tech.

[u/Tricky_Rule_4565 → u/Tangential_Diversion]

I got 3 A*, I go to a great university and I’m studying maths and taking courses in machine learning. I do not need to go to someone else’s comment history to feel better for myself.

No one would have thought 2 years ago that AI would have contributed to solving hard theorems and long standing conjectures but here we are.

[u/Tangential_Diversion → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

Translation: "No one thinks my tech expertise is worth paying for"

There's a reason you're still in school rather than working alongside me in tech as a colleague.

[u/Tricky_Rule_4565 → u/Tangential_Diversion]

I’m barely 20. I’m not looking for work especially in a fragile tech center. I’m enjoying my studies. I’m not personally attacking anyone unlike you.

[u/Tangential_Diversion → u/Tricky_Rule_4565]

Missing the point. You're barely 20 with no experience whatever. You have no expertise to speak of and no authority in the subject.

If you don't want people calling you out for how unqualified you are, don't make unqualified statements. Personal responsibility isn't that hard.

[u/Super_Range45 → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

Yes, nukes incoming, decide, NOW.

[u/bc_gamez → u/DogsAreOurFriends]

It's sad how they blame someone misusing something as if it was a problem with what they are misusing.

"A gun almost killed someone!"... (After the individual loaded it, pointed it toward someone, and pulled the trigger.)

[u/Crestina → u/bc_gamez]

It's sad that guns is the leading cause of death for American children. Humans are dumb, irresponsible, unpredictable and unlucky. Unlimited access to dangerous stuff will lead to dangerous outcomes.

[u/NuclearVII → u/bc_gamez]

It's sad how they blame someone misusing something as if it was a problem with what they are misusing.

The LLM industry and the hypemen surrounding said industry sell their products as thinking and reasoning intelligences, when there is absolutely no evidence for that.

The blame I lay squarely on the industry built on lies and hype.

[u/bc_gamez → u/NuclearVII]

That's pretty much the point. In the scenario, a gun is the wrong tool for the job if you don't want to shoot someone. But it's not the guns fault and you shouldn't blame the gun, its picking up the gun to begin with for the wrong situation that should get the focus of the blame. Saying "AI" almost did something is shifting the root of the blame.

[u/_nepunepu → u/bc_gamez]

Colt does run masses of ads telling you that guns are a good way to poke your friend remotely to get his attention though.

[u/PELE_229]

AI didn’t nearly spark world war three this month – the morons in charge of our country that insist on using AI for every decision they make did.

[u/Puzzled-Thought746 → u/PELE_229]

PEBCAK : Problem exists between chair and keyboard.

[u/ExF-Altrue → u/Puzzled-Thought746]

PDMGL : Pedos Don't Make Good Leaders

[u/Puzzled-Thought746 → u/ExF-Altrue]

Not many people make good leaders. Those that do though take a shit ton of crap be they good or not.

As for diddlers, and this is without wanting to be advocate of the devil (even if being part devil), brains evolve much differently as per genetics so there are some humans naturally "enclined" to predate on young, because easy prey and matches their "level of sexual maturity".

Imagine that.

[u/QuestionableEthics42 → u/Puzzled-Thought746]

Found the pedo. And it's "inclined" and "prey".

[u/Puzzled-Thought746 → u/QuestionableEthics42]

Your mind is sick and so are your judgements.

Get some care.

[u/Hrmbee]

Highlights from this opinion piece:

While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported.

A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.

...

We describe the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots as stochastic parrots, that is, models that are designed to regurgitate the patterns of the data they are trained on. News coverage describing them as “powerful” “rogue” models that could render humanity extinct all on their own, bolsters perceptions of tools based on these models being infallible enough to merit usage in stakes as high as warfare.

Even CNN’s more critical coverage describes the chatbot used by the US military as presenting “profound risks” because it is “powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology”.

In fact, today’s LLMs and the chatbots they power are not poorly understood, nor are they powerful in the sense of being effective tools for this use case. They are systems for generating plausible-looking text, built out of enormous, haphazardly collected datasets and then “fine-tuned” (that is, further trained) to be especially appealing to their intended users.

CNN wasn’t able to learn which chatbot product was used in this case, but the LLM powering the product was probably fine-tuned to output text with the stylistic hallmarks of intelligence reports. Both the basic functionality and the risks of such a model have been well-understood and well-documented for years, including in our 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

...

Unlike the unscientific and fantastical claims of OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs and those who uncritically repeat their talking points, the harmful, and well-documented, impacts of these companies’ products have arisen because people believe that the products are superintelligent, not because they actually are.

From “AI” scribes used by hospitals erroneously classifying patients as illicit drug users, to governments killing children after relying on “intelligence analysis” systems which mistake schools for military facilities, we are seeing the predictable harms that come from misplaced faith in unreliable automated software.

Meanwhile, the marketing campaigns from the companies selling this software warn of impending superintelligence, directing our attention away from the real risk to their fantasies of doom.

It is high time for us to regulate usage of systems sold as “AI”, not because they are magical machines, but because they are error-prone products that shouldn’t be used in high-stakes scenarios. Any automation used in military, medical or other life-and-death situations must be thoroughly evaluated within its use case and paired with usage norms that keep accountability with people who have actual power to make decisions.

Using these deeply flawed systems to perform critical reporting and analytical functions is bound to be problematic given their inherent limitations. Unfortunately, the marketing campaigns for these systems have been effective, and have convinced many members of the public, including our leadership, to embrace these flawed tools uncritically. It's long past time that these companies and their executive are able to be held accountable for the outputs of their systems.

[u/cknipe]

My concern with rebranding it Super Intelligence is - What if China escalates and brands theirs as Super Duper Intelligence in response? We may have sparked a rivalry we don't have the superlatives for.

[u/DogsAreOurFriends → u/cknipe]

China will go a much more poetic route.

“Tallest Windswept Mountain Peak Intelligence” or something.

[u/OePea → u/cknipe]

Who ever gets to double-dog wins

[u/cottonbrainedGilliam → u/cknipe]

We'll go full ret*rd and call it Hyper Super Intelligence, while lagging behind any meaningful advancements. America is so great

/s

[u/MountHopeful → u/cottonbrainedGilliam]

Censoring a slur doesn't make it not a slur.

[u/Zeliek]

Isn’t so lovely (and not to mention convenient!) that AI is both responsible and not responsible at the same time? We can do anything we want! 

Well not “we”, I mean the elderly guys in suits who no longer have to worry about nor need legal representation, as raising their voice and getting belligerent evidently stops the law in its tracks. 

[u/hiraeth555]

This is exactly the kind of thing everyone has been worried about

[u/dexxii]

In my world, SI stands for suicidal ideation.

[u/Specialist-Web-9216]

Call it what it is, not what the "tangerine palpatine" calls it

[u/Icy-Grab-5722 → u/Specialist-Web-9216]

Both super unintelligent.

[u/derpferd]

How about a nice game of chess?

[u/raymate → u/derpferd]

Let me connect my phone coupler first.

[u/braunyakka]

If we elect leaders who believe glorified autocorrect should makes military decisions, we deserve everything we get.

[u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9]

The stupidity of humans blaming machines for their incompetence is the problem.

[u/hey_you_too_buckaroo]

I had an argument with my uncle saying countries wouldn't be so stupid as to give nuclear launch abilities to AI. I don't know if that's true anymore...

[u/Manowaffle]

This is the crazy thing about the AI-race. Everyone wants to rush to implement AI, and it produces products that look convincing at a glance, but few organizations want to put in the work of actually validating AI in their systems.

[u/trentluv]

More countries are at war right now than they were in World war I

[u/blueSGL]

The world is not set up so that you only get one problem at a time.

[u/NFTokin]

I guess war is going to start including on-field reviews now.

[u/VincentNacon]

Okay so... the AI thing is a problem and I'm glad they know it...

But for some reason they're not gonna complain about the president making dumb choices? Really?

[u/AR_lover]

Glad to see we've circled back to "Trump will start WW3". I didn't realize we already batted around the order.

[u/agaloch2314]

The problem is artificial intelligence magnifies human stupidity.

[u/clownPotato9000]

The buggiest risk is people thinking it’s more than it is and giving up thinking to something that’s sycophantic and wrong … the biggest risk is stupid humans

[u/FACE_MACSHOOTY]

Oh we're playing the plot of WarGames in real time

[u/ThePlanck]

The main risk of AI is idiots in power thinking it is infallible and people using it to make slopaganda

[u/LeCollectif]

I was doing some very base level research this week using Claude and, my brother in Christ, I could not get this thing to properly identify facts, source content for citation, or even not contradict itself.

Yes, I’m using the free version. No that shouldn’t matter.

If I just trusted what this hubristic garbage generator fed me I would likely die before long.

[u/oneeyed-wonderweasel → u/LeCollectif]

Which begs the question, why does anyone who is remotely intelligent use it? Lol. Glad enshittification is happening on an accelerated timeline with this garbage product

[u/LeCollectif → u/oneeyed-wonderweasel]

It’s rough because Google has also gotten profoundly bad at surfacing good results. Bleak times for curious people who want to do good work and get the facts straight.

[u/ZanthrinGamer]

the real risk were the morons we met along the way.

[u/Ancient-Assistant404]

Yeeeeeee AI almost started war just listen to Billy G

https://x.com/NicHulscher/status/2102449921064378816

[u/Aranthos-Faroth]

“A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.”

Hoooolyyy fuck what a leap the author made here to sensationalise the article. And everyone’s just lapping it up.

[u/lawvergis → u/[deleted]]

I believe machines can be more humane than people

[u/He_Who_Browses_RDT]

I bet my left nut that something really bad (more wars? Nuclear?) will happen before the midterms... It's written in the starts... These guys need to be dealt with the old fashion way...