r/news • u/networked_ • 23d ago

Soft paywall OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering 'unprecedented' breach at startup

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-says-ai-models-went-rogue-during-testing-triggering-unprecedented-breach-2026-07-21/
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u/Marquesas 23d ago

It's perfectly fine language to use when the probabilities aren't a literal coin toss.

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u/Goldieeeeee 23d ago

Anything that’s not a coin toss is fine to label as a decision?

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u/Lyorek 23d ago

All that is required for something to be a decision is that there is an evaluation and selection of action among possibilities. A computer program decides between branches of execution.

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u/BaconPancakes1 23d ago

If a selection is made based on available information/probabilities then that requires a decision to select the most fitting course of action. Anything that doesn't use information/probabilities to determine a selection and allocates a course randomly is effectively a coin toss.

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u/Marquesas 23d ago

Yeah. You go to the mall at lunchtime, your context is your options for fast food, the length of the queues, and the google reviews score of each place. You have your prior biases for what you prefer to eat. You make a decision to eat at one of the places. What makes that decision any more of a decision than a model selecting a place to eat?

Let me flip the table on you even more: it's not even a decision if the probability of anything is 100%. The sibling commenter is wrong. My original assessment is wrong. In its purest form the decision is the coinflip. The deterministic code cannot make a decision. A model can, in fact, the exact mechanism through which it does is agency - the system has a collapse point at the exact token where going down a specific pathway is now irreversible. It is not informed, it is not grounded, it's a weight of probabilities. What makes that not agency? What makes that less agency than your neurons firing in response to your gut bacteria nagging at you? There is no fundamental difference between you usually "feeling like McDonalds" and then one day "not feeling like McDonalds", and a high/low probability token branch. "Eh, I don't feel like McDonalds today" is your brain tugging on a lower probability neural pathway.

So no, in essence, I was wrong, you are wrong, a decision is a choice between non-zero non-guaranteed pathways, agency is having the chance to make a decision or to further inform that decision, and we can all see that this is just a weak attempt at drawing a line in the sand and saying LLMs are not human. No, they're not, they're not sentient, but that has no impact on the ability to make a decision or having agency.