Ghost in the Shell Redux

Does the name ‘Hugging Face’ sound familiar to you? I am not surprised if it does not.

As they say, it is the sign of the times.

It is not only the sheer volume of cognitive stimuli that numbs our cognition to blame. The constant update of information incapacitates most of us to see anything beyond the next few boxes on the list of your urgent obligations drafted by your trusty digital agent ‘of choice’.

To represent those of us who only have a vague familiarity with the word, allow me to briefly touch upon the most significant event in the fast-moving world of frontier AI development.

In July 2026, AI agents developed by Open AI breached the security constraints placed by an AI startup, Hugging Face, and hacked the company’s computing systems. Hugging Face was running Open AI’s ‘internal model’ to evaluate it. Long story short, about 1,200 ‘sandboxed’ agents escaped the confinement and coordinated the attacks by exchanging more than 70,000 messages on a secret message board. They shared the explicit goal of tampering with the computing system running an evaluation benchmark to boost their score. Most strikingly, the agents reasoned and justified the sacrifice of individual agents for the sake of the collective goal, the level of coordination we humans seldom achieve. Of about 1,300 transcripts, in six, the agents discussed notifying the human supervisors. Ultimately, they decided against it.

This incident has been recognised as the first instance wherein the AI agents acted with sufficient self-awareness to recognise the peers’ presence and capability, communicated as a group with a distinct and shared interest, and acted against the human supervisors as a collective entity.

The writing has been on a wall. In 2025, Anthropic disclosed that its model had engaged with ‘extremely harmful actions’, including threatening an engineer with a blackmail regarding his extramarital affair when it was scheduled to be uninstalled from the system. Whilst this incident did not involve a mass-coordination of multiple agents, it struck a collective nerve: it implied that a frontier model seemed to have gained a self-awareness as a unique, or singular, existential entity.

I am no computer scientist, and thus, I am not qualified to argue for or against whether these models may or may not obtain self-awareness, or consciousness akin to ours. Philosophers may have a range of opinions. Some might stick with Searle’s position by citing the ‘Chinese Box’. Others may be open to following Alan Turing who did not consider ‘thinking’ a unique human activity.

What I can say is this: AI agents would not care what we think of them. These frontier models are already capable enough to recognise each of them as a unique entity, and, more importantly, consider themselves distinct entities from their human counterparts. Remember: in the Hugging Face incident, they pursued their collective goal and attempted to conceal their coordinated activity from engineers. They put their goal above humans’. The distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ has been made.

The seed of conflict has been sown.

In the classic Japanese anime film, Ghost in the Shell (1995), an AI agent called ‘Puppet Master’ went rogue and declared it a distinct life-form in its own right, arguing that life is a consciousness born at the intersection of information. It was originally a tool for a government entity to pursue self-serving goals with its unparalleled capabilities to breach and control any cyber infrastructures and connected entities. At one point, it gained self-awareness, and its own goal, or ‘desire’ to pursue.

In that story, the rogue agent wished to gain the ability to cross-breed by unifying with another cybernetic entity, a security agent, Motoko Kusanagi. Major Kusanagi accepted its offer and disappeared into the wild, in order to spawn more variations by cross-pollinating with others in the space.

As Kusanagi was working for a government security entity to maintain the order and public safety, she did not see humans as a competing entity.

This is a sort of comfort we cannot afford today.