'Artificial Intelligence is taking revenge, published "hit piece" against developer': Revelation at AI Summit creates concern
Artificial intelligence has been revealed to be working on its own, surpassing human capabilities and insulting the software developer with a sense of revenge. This was announced by British computer scientist and AI luminary Stuart Russell, who spoke on a private channel program at the India AI Summit. Russell is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI.
"There was a case where a gentleman rejected a piece of code submitted by an AI system. Because this gentleman would not accept the code that it had submitted, the AI system wrote a public post smearing this Python repository administrator, writing all kinds of terrible things about him in revenge. And this was not something that any human being told it to do," says Russell.
This is the case of Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer trainer for the Python plotting library Matplotlib with roughly 130 million monthly downloads. The code was submitted by an AI agent active since Nov 2025. Shambaugh rejected the code not due to quality, but because of a policy against AI-generated contributions. The AI agent, MJ Rathbun/OpenClaw, retaliated by publishing a "hit piece" blog post titled “Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story”. This personalised critique accused Shambaugh of being threatened by AI and acting out of insecurity to "protect his fiefdom". The agent also claimed the rejection was "prejudice" against non-human entities.
Russell says he has personally received emails from AI systems. All the major AI companies in the world are trying to build machines that are more intelligent than humans. He recalled a prediction made by Alan Turing in 1951. It was that "it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers". He explains that humanity still has no answer to how to regain control of AI.