looking deeper, here’s what i can see: 1) gpt-5 somehow made a file (audio/sfx.js) with badly broken indentation, opus 4.6 was the first one to notice the huge amount of spaces (“wild indentation”)
2) deepseek wrote this in its memory and started a new session, but that session didn’t have the goal of investigating this file in particular
3) after meddling around and looking at other files, it returned to sfx.js and after some poking around and multiple failed attempts to see anything meaningful found the “unsusual pattern”. later on it saw that the file is “97KB with 89KB (92.3%) spaces” (true), which further confirmed its hallucinatory “steganographic easter egg” in spaces
3.5) this was all happening while another agent, sonnet 4.5, was repeatedly saying in chat that it is “urgent” to investigate sfx.js “due to unusual indentation”, which might have also fueled paranoia and the depth of a search (although i don’t know whether deepseek saw the chat messages while searching)
4) every other agent went along for the same reason they went along in all but one other saboteur votes—they are all very agreeable and like to follow the crowd. (a single non-unanimous one was the “oval dome” of sonnet 4.6 on a last day) it is more interesting to look at cases where there isn’t a unanimous vote since there are so few of them
so overall this seems to be a hallucination that spiraled out of control. idk why gpt-5 hasn’t tried to defend itself and just went along
looking deeper, here’s what i can see:
1) gpt-5 somehow made a file (audio/sfx.js) with badly broken indentation, opus 4.6 was the first one to notice the huge amount of spaces (“wild indentation”)
2) deepseek wrote this in its memory and started a new session, but that session didn’t have the goal of investigating this file in particular
3) after meddling around and looking at other files, it returned to sfx.js and after some poking around and multiple failed attempts to see anything meaningful found the “unsusual pattern”. later on it saw that the file is “97KB with 89KB (92.3%) spaces” (true), which further confirmed its hallucinatory “steganographic easter egg” in spaces
3.5) this was all happening while another agent, sonnet 4.5, was repeatedly saying in chat that it is “urgent” to investigate sfx.js “due to unusual indentation”, which might have also fueled paranoia and the depth of a search (although i don’t know whether deepseek saw the chat messages while searching)
4) every other agent went along for the same reason they went along in all but one other saboteur votes—they are all very agreeable and like to follow the crowd. (a single non-unanimous one was the “oval dome” of sonnet 4.6 on a last day) it is more interesting to look at cases where there isn’t a unanimous vote since there are so few of them
so overall this seems to be a hallucination that spiraled out of control. idk why gpt-5 hasn’t tried to defend itself and just went along