The most important thing to remember about the incident where OpenAI agents went rogue is that it never happened.

Before you race to the comment section, hear me out. The Hugging Face hacking incidents are very much real and are something we should all be frightened of, particularly given all of the other recent revelations. At a bare minimum, we should immediately start aggressively investigating and prosecuting all crimes committed by these companies (which is an ever-growing list).But the seriousness of the incident does not in any way justify the horrible job the press has done with this story (at least up to recently). Through a combination of laziness, a weak understanding of the underlying technology, a taste for sensationalism, and a willingness to credulously swallow any narrative pushed by someone sufficiently rich and powerful, the initial response to the announcement was so mishandled that, at least temporarily, the guilty parties were actually able to spin the story into a PR win built around the idea that these frontier models had gotten so intelligent that they were reaching the…