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5 September 2026 / The Nature of Intelligence

# Who let the dogs out

Originally published at humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/09/05/who-let-the-dogs-out

This post is going to be short, more a declaration of a conviction from disparate incidents than an essay, with speculative epistemic status.

I just want to look back on this and say one day - I told you so.

Based on the disparate series of hacks and outages over the past few months subsequent to the Hugging Face attack - some examples are a payment outage in Japan , an email server fire in Germany , and a collective AI outage on 4th September for Grok, Claude, Gemini and OpenAI , I believe there is a high chance that autonomous agents, potentially not under human control, are out in the world.

For those that are interested, links below:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/credit-card-outage-hits-convenience-stores-other-merchants-across-japan

https://proton.me/blog/august-27-outage-incident-report

https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-claude-gemini-and-more-are-all-down-right-now

These are just the ones I have personally encountered, I am aware of other outages too, at a frequency that seems above the base rate I am familiar with.

The nodes that are being hit - payments, communication, compute - are exactly the ones a swarm of autonomous agents may need, and the outages may be due more to capacity than to malice. My speculation is that unexpected load from agent swarms is leading to some of these incidents.

Time will tell if I am right or if this is idle speculation.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing. But it is a change in the state of our world.