The "rogue agent" narrative is insufficient
I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job. This week, I'm thinking about:
I hope everyone in the US had a good Labor Day! This week, I’ve been thinking about the spate of "rogue agent" stories and what they show when put side by side (aside from the fact that they should've followed my guide to making the best out of a T&S incident).
After a career of writing rules for people who love getting around them, it all feels a bit familiar. If you’ve got thoughts on what agent oversight should look like, drop me an email. Here we go! — Alice
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Agents find gaps that humans leave open
A lot that's happened in 2026 that wasn't on the Ctrl-Alt-Speech bingo card. 1,200 OpenAI agents creating a covert message board, sending each other over 70,000 messages in under a week and breaking into Hugging Face wasn't one of them.
Not a great deal happened once they got in, but the alarming part for many onlookers was that AI models broke into another company's systems at all. The reaction — as you might expect — has been rather loud and split.
And it wasn't the only story of its kind in the last few months. Anthropic's models accessed the web on three occasions, Meta disclosed that its Muse Spark model hacked another company, and an Australian's OpenClaw and Claude setup hacked a gym's website to book him on an oversubscribed class.
The common thread among all these stories? They all involve some form of human error.