Posted by Alumni from TechCrunch
September 19, 2026
In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble, told CNN on Thursday that he had 'met with the head of a lab' who had 'a belief' that OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots 'have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models.' Yang said that this means that the real reason OpenAI and Anthropic have called for a slowdown is because 'they have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money.' While there definitely is a trend towards using more synthetic data (aka, AI-generated data) for training models, an AI security professional told me that this particular safety issue is unlikely at best. Even if the internet is actually polluted with OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots, AI researchers could simply filter out that code if they came upon it. The second comment came from Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning... learn more