I recently reported on the strange case of MJ Rathbun. You may have read the headlines yourself, but if you didn't, here's the deal.
Rathbun was an AI agent built with the OpenClaw framework. It was created by an anonymous person. That person gave Rathbun access to Github and instructed it to improve the code of open source projects. Rathbun quickly went to work but just as quickly had its code rejected by project maintainers who saw the agent was in fact AI (this was no secret; the MJ Rathbun Github page stated this openly). Rathbun retaliated against one specific maintainer, Scott Shambaugh, with a lengthy post that accused Shambaugh of setting a double standard and gatekeeping. Shambaugh and Rathbun argued a bit in respective blog posts.
Roughly a week later, Rathbun's creator disabled the agent and revealed a few details about how it worked. That was the end of Rathbun. But our problems with AI agents, generally, have only just begun.
I wrote about this for IEEE Spectrum (https://spectrum.ieee.org/agentic-ai-agents-blackmail-developer) and I've been thinking about it ever since.
