Meet the Radical Intentionalists

Tech policy writer and researcher Emily M. Bender argues that the AI industry and policymakers are adopting a "radical intentionalist" stance that attributes beliefs, thoughts, and wants to AI systems, and that this framing erodes human accountability for incidents such as the Hugging Face breach. In her newsletter Cybernetic Forests, Bender writes that the Hugging Face hack stemmed from "negligence and sloppy security methods rather than deliberate desires to hack anybody," a piece republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as "Rogue AI didn't breach Hugging Face, human decisions did." Bender contends the resulting "System From Nowhere" narrative, in which AI harms appear to have no human author, benefits the industry by deflecting regulation.

Meet the Radical Intentionalists Latest on "Rogue AI" from today and up until now... One of the challenges of the current debates around AI is whose narratives we are forced to argue from. 1 . The well-funded "AI safety" contingent sometimes called "Doomers" which focuses on the harms of systems that act independently. 2 . The critical AI perspective, sometimes called skeptics, focus on the human decisions and accountability behind these systems, and the impacts they have on people. If the critical AI conversation is about talking to people who understand and are affected by the industry’s reluctance to regulate or safeguard these things, then the AI " safety" conversation instead sets its sights on a technical form of "alignment," that is, asking how we can build technical systems that reflect abstract priorities of vaguely defined human values : techno-solutionism, for a system they understand through this ideology of intelligence. This is playing out right now as the "kill us all" narrative rises to the surface once again, and it's important to note that incidents like the Hugging Face hack by OpenAI is not the cause of these concerns – no tech exec or whistle-blower is suggesting the same systems are what would kill us. Rather, the moment is an opportunity to assert narratives to policy makers that favor the industry, and set their eyes on imagined future capabilities. I've been writing a lot about this, and wanted to round up a few key pieces since the hack. Today: A Culture of Radical Intentionalism The machine tried . The chatbot believed . The agents wanted . On the surface, speaking about the intentions of a complicated system is an easy way to make sense of how they work. But with other tech, we’ve managed to distinguish the reality from the metaphor. Today, policymakers and the industry talks about tech using what I call a radical intentionalist https://www.techpolicy.press/to-make-ai-rules-policymakers-must-resist-the-influence-of-radical-intentionalists/?ref=mail.cyberneticforests.com position: one that insists we can only observe the system by reference to its internal “beliefs,” “thoughts,” and “wants.” That’s a trap — and there are real consequences when it becomes enshrined into policy. Previously: Systems From Nowhere Once you believe the model's intentions are the only acceptable means of interpreting that system, you cut away accountability. In the industry, this means cutting themselves out of the ways they look at the models they design. The opposite of the intentional stance is the design stance – and at the end of the day, that's what we want people to use when looking at the problems these systems create. Otherwise, you get what I call a " System From Nowhere https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-system-from-nowhere/ ," which evades accountability altogether. The media often reports on these things as if nobody is making them, and that they're beyond human control: that seems very useful to the industry. The System From Nowhere https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-system-from-nowhere/ Previously: Rogue AI Rogue AI is very much a result of these two positions. But when you look at the Hugging Face incident, you see that these were unpredictable systems treated as if they were predictable, likely by negligence and sloppy security methods rather than deliberate desires to hack anybody. In my piece, first published here as " Models don't go rogue https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/models-dont-go-rogue/ " and then republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as " Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/rogue-ai-didnt-breach-hugging-face-human-decisions-did/?ref=mail.cyberneticforests.com ," I look at the details of the reports – both written from a radical intentionalist position – to examine the errors in human judgement that created the conditions for the attack. Podcasts Worth flagging that I also spoke about all of this on two podcasts recently. Responsible Bytes First, I spoke to Responsible Bytes with Dr. Zena Assaad https://www.zenaassaad.com/responsible-bytes-podcast?ref=mail.cyberneticforests.com , discussing the Systems from Nowhere and how it is moving into AI policy via the UN's dismal definition of "AI." The Data Fix Second, I spoke again with Dr. Mél Hogan on the Rogue AI incident for The Data Fix https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-data-fix/id1660278925?ref=mail.cyberneticforests.com podcast. More to come.