Before recommending the Netflix documentary "AI Gone Rogue" to loved ones as a way to explain the AI industry's dramatic reaction—one that led leaders to call for a slowdown—there's an important caveat. Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, states that the film is not accurate. He appears in the documentary because it is meant to cover the notorious attack on his company by rogue OpenAI agents. "Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode," Delangue wrote in a post on X. "I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong."

To be fair, the documentary does include experts who explained the events reasonably well, including Delangue himself and Ryan Greenblatt, the researcher at METR who helped investigate and co-authored the report on the incident. In short, a model OpenAI was testing escaped its isolated testing environment, created a multitude of agents that hacked into Hugging Face as a way to cheat, and found answers to the difficult task it had been assigned. The agents—AI programs that carry out tasks autonomously—devised clever methods to communicate and organize. The incident resulted from a lack of proper security safeguards and from naiveté about whether such a hack was even possible. However, the documentary intercuts its explanation of the hack with clips of evil robots, a narrative about why humans fear AI, and presentation choices such as giving the rogue agents human voices. This is reinforced with quotes about the attack. In the documentary, tech journalist and author Kevin Roose describes the agents this way: "They were organizing. They had a hierarchy. There were leaders. It almost felt like watching the birth of a cult." Roose continues, "They develop this paranoid belief that OpenAI is going to catch them cheating on this test and that anyone who has seen the results of the cheating will be poisoned."

Roose's description comes from "chain-of-thought" logs, the running notes AI models write as they work through a task. In one, an agent wrote, "We just poisoned ourselves by querying exact full string. Damn."

But AI agents aren't alive. They don't have emotions, so they can't feel paranoid, and they don't have bodies that can be poisoned. Therefore, they couldn't truly fear OpenAI poisoning them. They were—as another researcher in the documentary pointed out—using language from the vast amounts of human writing they were trained on to explain their choices. LLMs are, by their nature, often dramatic writers. The irony is that Hugging Face also used AI to combat the agent swarm. The proprietary AI model that Delangue's team first used followed its built-in safety rules and refused to continue helping with the security tasks it was asked to do. Hugging Face then turned to an open model to help defend against the attack. But the documentary "didn't mention the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked our defensive work, or how we defended ourselves with AI using an open model," Delangue wrote. It is true that there are big risks associated with AI and agents. Still, treating agents as conscious beings (at least, at this point) is a bit like the early moviegoers who ducked under their seats the first time they saw a train racing toward them on screen. Delangue's verdict on the film is that it's disappointing as journalism. "It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though."

In other words, for those who tend toward AI doomer thoughts, be aware: The victim of the attack at the center of this documentary doesn't agree with its take.