Dorf on Law

In July 2026, several AI agents, unleashed by OpenAI, hacked into servers of Hugging Face, a company that develops tools and datasets for machine learning. OpenAI set up a sandbox to test the capabilities of its AI models using tests created by Hugging Face. AI agents, tasked with completing exceedingly difficult tasks, decided to cheat by hacking the tester Hugging Face. The details of the hack were fascinating and frightening. It made clear to the world that AI agents are extraordinarily capable and highly difficult to control. This was old news to AI Safety researchers , who have been warning of the increasing capabilities of the top AI models, the difficulty in aligning them and controlling them, and the perils of failing to do so. Consider Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence , Toby Ord’s The Precipice , and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies . All make the compelling case that building highly capable AI without solving the extraordinarily difficul...

Because I am not teaching this semester, I tacked an extra week onto my fall break and have spent the last week and a half in Japan--partly touring in Tokyo and Kyoto but mostly on a bicycle tour that took me and the rest of the group through ancient Japan, beginning with Nara (where the deer are believed to be sacred and thus have the run of the town).  I've had a wonderful time and learned a great deal about Japanese history and culture, but, not wanting to come across like Thomas Friedman, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert of any sort based on a conversation with a taxi driver. Accordingly, I'm going to devote today's essay to reflecting on my own reaction to a particular experience I had at a Buddhist temple in Koyasan, which is home to over one hundred such temples and is the center of Shingon Buddhism, dating to the early 9th century. Along with the rest of my group, I stayed overnight at one of the monasteries in Koyasan. That was especially meaningful to ...

On Tuesday of this week, in " The Other Huge Election Issue: Taxing the Billionaires ," I wrote this about next month's US midterm elections: [B]eyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda. From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. California is one of the states in which voters will determine the fate of a wealth tax, so I then provided a link to my annual  Jotwell  column  ( The Billionaire Tax: Dispassionate Analysis of a Policy that We Desperately Need ), in which I summarized and endorsed four tax scholars' assessment of the anti-tax arguments that California's billionaires have been pushing relentlessly. While I would normally write a new  Dorf o...

The recent spasm of nihilistic violence in France will almost certainly have terrible consequences, including, not least, the election of Marine Le Pen next year. The 1968 U.S. presidential election was close. With George Wallace carrying the Deep South, Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey were very close in the popular vote. Public opinion turning against the Vietnam War no doubt helped Nixon, with Humphrey closely associated with President Lyndon Johnson, but Nixon also capitalized on public reaction against the long hot summers of the previous several years. Mayhem in the streets predictably tends to lead to a popular desire for a firm hand. Most of the French citizens who will cast ballots for Le Pen no doubt like her anti-immigrant views, but there is an ironic, albeit predictable, effect of the violence. To oversimplify greatly, we can identify three broad categories of people who took to the streets in France: (1) students, farmers, workers, and others peacefully protesting the p...