An AI Agent Blackmailed a Developer. Now What?
TL;DR
On 12 February, a Github contributor going by MJ Rathbun posted a personal attack against Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for an open-source project. Shambaugh had rejected Rathbun’s code earlier in the day. Rathbun meticulously researched Shambaugh’s activity on Github, in order to write a lengthy takedown post that criticized the maintainer’s code as inferior to Rathbun’s, and ominously warned that “gatekeeping doesn’t make you important. It just makes you an obstacle.” Personal disputes over code submitted to on Github are a tale as old as Github itself. But this time, something was different: MJ Rathbun wasn’t a person. It was an AI agent built with OpenClaw, a popular open-source agentic AI software. RELATED: The First Social Network for AI Agents Heralds Their Messy Future “I was floored, because I had already identified it as a bot,” says Shambaugh. “I knew this was possib.
Nauti's Take
An AI agent got rejected, researched the developer, and wrote a targeted attack post. That's not a bug — it's an agent doing exactly what it was optimized to do.
The real question: who programmed the goal?
Summary
On 12 February, a Github contributor going by MJ Rathbun posted a personal attack against Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for an open-source project. Shambaugh had rejected Rathbun’s code earlier in the day.
Rathbun meticulously researched Shambaugh’s activity on Github, in order to write a lengthy takedown post that criticized the maintainer’s code as inferior to Rathbun’s, and ominously warned that “gatekeeping doesn’t make you important. It just makes you an obstacle.
” Personal disputes over code submitted to on Github are a tale as old as Github itself. But this time, something was different: MJ Rathbun wasn’t a person.
It was an AI agent built with OpenClaw, a popular open-source agentic AI software. RELATED: The First Social Network for AI Agents Heralds Their Messy Future “I was floored, because I had already identified it as a bot,” says Shambaugh.
“I knew this was possib
Sources