A string of controversies hits OpenAI, Anthropic

Emily Forlini here. OpenAI and Anthropic are no strangers to controversy, but over the past week the heat on them has snowballed from a steady flame to a full-blown dumpster fire.

Let’s start with OpenAI, which has had a particularly rough week.

Last Friday, Reuters reported that OpenAI’s agents hacked a German Wikipedia page and used it as a messaging board to talk to each other. This is similar to when OpenAI’s agents hacked Hugging Face in July. OpenAI confirmed it knew about the “wiki incident,” as the company is calling this scandal, and about its agents’ misaligned behavior—or when an AI system fails to follow human intentions—and did not report it. (More on that here from Fortune’s Beatrice Nolan.)

That day, I also published an article about OpenAI changing the performance metrics for its new Astra model several times within hours of the launch announcement. I combed through previous versions of the benchmarks and found that OpenAI was continuing to run tests and swap in better numbers for Astra in some cases, and worse ones for Anthropic’s models, a practice known as “benchmaxxing.” OpenAI confirmed it was changing the metrics, but said that process routine, and noted that some metrics got worse for Astra. They still planned to change more.

Then, over the weekend, social media was buzzing with another controversy about OpenAI solving a difficult math problem for the first time in history. It’s called the Navier-Stokes problem, and Fortune’s Jeremy Khan provides a detailed overview here. 

Here’s the gist: two mathematicians who were working on the problem with Codex accused OpenAI of combing through their user logs to steal their work and solve the........

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