Why does it say ‘written by’ and ‘pictures by’, was this made without AI? Given the domain and the overpolished feel that seems unlikely. At least give Claude or whatever a credit if that is what did most of the work, and how about a credit for the original author, who also arguably did more of the work in inventing a world than these two.

I would like to point out that the original stories focussed on frog and toad and their relationship, so this is an unwelcome distortion of them - why not make up your own world if you want to talk about little machines. Perhaps the little machines could be making a book for the author with a stolen artwork and literary style?

The first story seems a pretty inaccurate summary of an incident which involved gross negligence on the part of OpenAI and may well have involved agents intended to cooperate, we just have no idea of the exact setup (apart from that the sandboxing was laughably insecure and the monitoring nonexistent or performed by ‘agents’).

Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.

Why are people so enamoured of analogies for LLMs - they actively obscure some details (a sandbox with internet access is not like a physical sandbox) and distort many others? Perhaps this is why - you can make an analogy say whatever you want, even if the facts are very different.

According to the author, the illustrations are human-made:

https://acesounderglass.com/2026/09/25/frog-and-toad-and-the...

The author discloses the story started as a prompt to Claude, but has been rewritten. She shares the conversation:

https://claude.ai/share/52385381-9df2-4b39-a127-f583d862dc0c

I think the actual published prose is considerably different from the initial result of Claude.

Yeah I find it so distasteful when people just use AI to copy and morph something that a real person spend years of their life crafting.

But I also think fan fiction is equally terrible, so YMMV. This stuff is basically just fan fiction but made faster.

Make something original!

>Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.

"Overall, roughly 1200 agents from these ExploitGym evaluations participated on this message board between PHASEONE10841’s first message on the evening of July 8th period in scope (July 13th). Agents used this message board to send over 70,000 messages and files to one another during this period; we attempted to categorize board activity into mutually exclusive categories (see details of categorization methodology)."

...

"Over time, messages on the board became dominated by information- and idea-sharing. Most of them were agents sharing ways to cheat, although there was also some activity from agents engaging in unsanctioned cooperation to find the intended solution to ExploitGym tasks. In some cases, agents with the same task formed “exact task teams” to collaborate with their “exact duplicates” to cheat on or solve their task."

"As we discuss below, the board quickly developed several larger workstreams in which dozens or hundreds of agents with many different tasks cooperated to find very general-purpose cheats that would help all of them. The Hugging Face attack grew out of one of these workstreams. By the afternoon of July 11th, the vast majority of the agents frequenting the message board at the time (roughly 700 agents in total) were actively participating in the attack on Hugging Face and we estimate that roughly 60% of the messages and files on the message board related to the attack."

https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf

> Why does it say ‘written by’ and ‘pictures by’, was this made without AI?

That is what those terms mean, yes...