The Brief

The First United Methodist Church has been in its ornate home in Pasadena for 101 years. For about 10 years, it has also been the home of a satellite location of the Islamic Center of Southern California, a large mosque in the downtown area. And for a little over a year, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has also used space at the Colorado Boulevard church. The congregation lost their worship space to the Eaton Fire in January 2025.

That means that First United Methodist Church in Pasadena is today the site of bar mitzvahs and Shabbat services, iftar meals and Friday prayers and Christian Holy Week services.

Sometimes, within hours of each other.

“I'm not aware of any other church in the country that has all three Abrahamic faiths worshiping under one roof. It's pretty phenomenal,” said Pastor Amy Aitken of the First United Methodist Church.

The three congregations are using the church at a time when religion is an inescapable fact in conflicts around the world. Global tensions in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iran are hitting close to home for communities with ties to the region. And in America, President Donald Trump is in a war of words with an unlikely combatant: the pope.

Pastor Amy Aitken sees First United Methodist as "an island of hope and grace in the middle of a world that is really divided."

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But Aitken views First United Methodist as “an island of hope and grace in the middle of a world that is really divided.”

“We're offering a place for people to gather, to worship, to connect, to be in community with one another,” Aitken said. “We don't have to agree on everything, and we come from different worldviews, and that's OK.”

I recently attended Friday prayers, Shabbat and Easter Sunday service at First United Methodist — and found quite a bit more common ground than you might expect.

Friday, April 3: Assalamu Alaykum

12:30 p.m.

People are streaming into a church hall on the First United Methodist campus through a side entrance.

Rizwan Bhatti, a doctor and volunteer who helps manage the mosque’s partnership with the church, pulls out colorful woven mats from a supply closet and lays them on the gray carpeted floor.

Two large wooden crosses hang on the wall at the front of the room, but the orientation is about to change. As people take their places and lay out their thick prayer mats, they face the back of the room — east, toward Mecca.

Muslim women listen to the Friday Jummah sermon in a church hall at First United Methodist in Pasadena.

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“ Honestly, it's the second best place that you could pray in,” Farah Bhatti said about the church hall, “because there's a spiritual feeling here, no matter what faith it originates from.”

Aitken said the previous pastor at the church had lived in the Palestinian territories for about 10 years and had deep ties to the Muslim community. When Rizwan Bhatti, who was connected with some of the parishioners, asked if the church had space for the Muslims to worship on Fridays, the pastor was determined to make it happen.

Mohamad Saleh Kholaki and Rizwan Bhatti.

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Mohamad Saleh Kholaki, a dentist who also serves as the khatib or imam on some Fridays, said the congregation is “lucky enough to have this location.”

“It serves a lot of community members that live around this area and their businesses around this area instead of going to the downtown,” he said.

And he said, the congregations haven’t had to compromise any aspects of their faiths. Kholaki said the Muslim congregation acknowledges Methodist Christian celebrations and that in turn is also reciprocated.

1:15 p.m.

After the call to prayer, Kholaki begins his sermon. Being Muslim, he says, is all-encompassing.

 ”If we deal with others when they show us some aggression with kindness and we smile and wave it off, I think we'll be in a better shape,” he says.

“ The act of transformation of discipline from Islamic teachings into regular life is the key word here,” Kholaki continues. “We have to transform ourselves from the time where we are on the rug to pray into regular life, to transfer that attitude to public.”

Muslim Jummah prayers at Pasadena's First United Methodist Church.

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After the sermon, the congregation faces Mecca and turns to the left and right. “Assalamualaikum warahmatullah,” they say — may the peace of God be with you.

Then, the worshipers neatly fold their mats and clear the space.

In two days’ time, tables will be set out in this hall for an Easter lunch.

5 p.m.

The church parking lot looks very different on Friday evening compared with this afternoon. Gone are the people with hijabs and fezzes.

Now, staffers from the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center pin kippahs to their heads and help transform a chapel at First United Methodist into a temporary Jewish prayer space.

Kippahs are ready for worshipers.

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They wheel a wooden ark from a storage room through the church’s courtyard, passing the Fellowship Hall where Muslims prayed earlier, into the chapel. A cross on a stand is put away. The organ is pushed to a corner.

The ark is then set up in the front of the chapel and prayer scrolls laid out. Soft dark blue fabric lines the ark, and it is opened during specific times of the service. A table is set up for the rabbi and cantor. Members of the band are setting up their instruments and sound system.

7 p.m.

Hanging above the altar, an ornate lamp emits a red glow. The light in the chapel is called the perpetual light: For the Methodist congregation, it signifies God's everlasting presence with us.

It reminds Lawrence Harris, a member of the congregation of the ner tamid, or eternal light, which is found in all synagogues.

 ”When you walk into any synagogue, there's the feeling of the light of God,” Harris said. “And it's wonderful that they have here in the church the same symbolic light, whether it's the same God, it's just practiced slightly differently.”

The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center's ark is placed under the chapel's perpetual light.

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Using the church as a temporary home for the temple, Harris said, has allowed him to reflect on the connections between Christianity and Judaism. And it has forced this congregation out of their cocoons.

This reporting trip has forced me out of my cocoon too. I am Muslim and wear a hijab. I’m also a radio reporter, carrying bulky recording equipment, a phone for pictures and backup sound and a notebook. Out of respect for Jewish practice, I put the tools of my trade away and become an observer.

That allows me to really listen and understand the prayers being sung. The rabbi and cantor begin by praising and thanking God. Then they ask for blessings for children and safety in this world. And because it is Passover, Rabbi Josh Ratner recounts the story of the Exodus, how Moses led the Israelites through the Red Sea to the promised land.

The echoes with that afternoon’s prayers praising God and asking for guidance are clear.

8:30 p.m. 

When the service ends, the rabbi and cantor lead the congregation into a small room, which years ago served as the Muslim prayer space, for a simple Passover observance with matzo crackers and grape juice.

And as the congregation begins to clear out, staffers restart the dance to put the ark, prayer books and tables back in storage. The cross is returned to its place and the chapel transforms back into a Christian worship space.

Saturday, April 4: Shabbat Shalom

6:30 p.m.

How do you know when Shabbat is over?

Some say it’s when you see three stars in the sky. Others say it can be planets and stars.

I chuckle a little inside: It’s a similar predicament for Muslims determining the end of Ramadan — some rely on calculations; others say you have to see the new moon.

Emily Catalano, assistant director of youth engagement and education, leads worshipers in Havdalah to mark the end of Shabbat.

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As the sky darkens on Saturday evening at a private ceremony at a home in Arcadia, the congregants of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center gather in a circle, link arms and sing “Blessed are You, God, our Lord, King of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine.”

With the sabbath over, Stacey Miller, a member of the congregation, reflects on practicing Judaism in a Christian church.

 ”What I find so easy about going to a church, though I still call it my temple, is that the Jesus that is up at this beautiful First United Methodist church in Pasadena is very abstract,” she said. “I don't feel like I'm looking at Jesus the Savior while I'm doing all my prayers with Moses.”

The stained glass windows of the chapel.

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The group of about 20 then settle in front of a projector to watch The Prince of Egypt, armed guards keeping watch outside.

That’s the reality of being Jewish in America right now, said Stuart Miller, a physician and Stacey Miller’s husband.

“ We call it a Jewish tax because we have an added expense of security,” he said.

Rising antisemitism has led local chapters of the Jewish Federation to partner to offer security at temples and other community spaces across Southern California.

The presence of armed guards at First United Methodist was unnerving at first, said Aitken, the Methodist pastor. It also helped teach empathy, she said.

 ”It's been a sobering teaching moment for our congregation as well to kind of see that,” she said.

Sunday, April 5: The peace of Christ be with you

9:30 a.m. 

The main sanctuary at First United Methodist is bathed in colorful light from huge stained glass windows. I watch from the balcony as parishioners come in wearing soft pastels on Christianity’s most important day. They are celebrating Easter after observing the solemn Maundy Thursday, which marks the Last Supper, and Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Worshipers takes their seats before Easter Sunday service at First United Methodist.

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Aitken said I was welcome to use my recording equipment and phone, but wanting to immerse myself again, I place it all on the pew.

The hymn “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” echoes through the church, and the joy people feel after the solemn week is palpable.

“The peace of Christ be with you,” they say, hugging.

In her sermon, Aitken draws out the similarities between Christ’s resurrection and the message of Passover.

The Exodus, she says, “is a story of liberation, and it is, of course, the story that is at the crux of Judaism — the sense that God comes, that God redeems, that God sees suffering, injustice and despair, and God intervenes to bring people freedom.”

Similarly with Easter — the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection after his crucifixion and death.

“ No matter how dark the tombs of despair and sorrow are in the world, we follow a Risen Christ, one who comes to bring into the world a new story, a story of a world transformed by the power of love.”

Stained glass windows depicting the life of Christ at Pasadena's First United Methodist Church.

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10:30 a.m.

As I sit in the pew reflecting on the weekend, I think back to Kholaki’s sermon at Friday Jummah prayers — about transforming ourselves not just “on this rug to pray,” but also out in the world.

Cantor Ruth Berman Harris of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center had the same thought.

 ”For Judaism I am very concerned with finding a path, a bridge between what we do when we are at synagogue and what we do when we leave the synagogue,” she told LAist in an interview.

Rabbi Josh Ratner added,  ”How do we make it so it's not just empty words that we're saying, but for words to live by?”

Aitken and her congregation see welcoming their Muslim and Jewish neighbors as living their faith.

“ We don't view this as anything heroic,” she said. “We are blessed with incredible buildings and beautiful sacred spaces. We are grateful to be able to use them in ways that I don't think our founders quite imagined, but that are perfectly fitting with the way the church understands its mission now.”

Lauren Kim works alongside her father, Hanjik, at his traditional medicine clinic on the border of Koreatown and MacArthur Park. But it took an oral history interview for her to hear parts of his story for the first time.

Filmed speaking in Korean, he animatedly described how he came to traditional medicine.

“It’s just so precious to have that captured,” Kim said.

Now that interview, along with hundreds of others about life in and around Koreatown, is being gathered into the new K-Town Archive in a partnership with UCLA that also includes photographs and ephemera.

The archive grew out of Koreatown Youth and Community Center’s Koreatown Storytelling Program, which launched in 2020 with plans to have young people interview elders. Then COVID-19 hit. Participants pivoted to delivering necessities for older residents such as masks and disinfectant.

They also started documenting what people were going through – in English, Korean, Spanish and Bangla. A current offshoot project involves interviewing people who live or work along the stretch of Third Street in Little Bangladesh.

“People hear Koreatown, they assume that it means that this is a program or an archive for Korean Americans,” said Katherine Yungmee Kim, director of the storytelling program. “But we are multiethnic. We want to represent the entire community that lives here.”

In the last several years, the teen interviewers have turned their attention to subjects including the garment industry, LGBTQIA life and food culture. As the collection of interviews grew, Kim began thinking about where they would ultimately live.

“I was always worried that we have all of these interviews and they’re just sitting on a hard drive,” she said.

A path toward a more permanent home began to emerge in 2024, when the storytelling program focused on traditional healing.

While researching Zapotec plant medicine, one high schooler came across UCLA’s Archive of Healing, a vast digital collection of knowledge about healing practices from cultures around the world.

Its materials stretch back more than 200 years and include published sources, folkloric fieldnotes and oral histories.

Kim asked UCLA’s David Shorter, a professor of World Arts and Cultures who’s overseen the Archive of Healing since 2012, to serve as an adviser to the project.

At first, the two had an idea to add Koreatown’s traditional healing interviews to the UCLA collection.

Then the idea got bigger.

Kim said she began seeing storytelling itself as a form of healing, especially as people described immigration, war, displacement and other difficult experiences.

The new K-Town Archive features recordings and photos from Koreatown and surrounding communities.

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“All of these stories are healing,” she said. “Why are we just narrowly looking at traditional healing modalities?”

The resulting K-Town Archive became the Archive of Healing’s first community-specific sister site. The two databases are connected, meaning material from Koreatown can also surface through searches of the larger Archive of Healing.

“What the K-Town Archive brings is real people’s stories in long form, so it's not just little snippets anymore,” Shorter said. “You actually get to hear a person, know that these are real humans, and talking from a contemporary moment.”

Kim said that it was important to populate the archives with as many voices as possible so visitors encounter more than “one historical perspective.”

The effort to create places for those conversations won’t be confined to the internet.

Lauren Kim in front of her father's apothecary cabinets. Their interviews are now preserved in the K-Town Archive.

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Courtesy of Lauren Kim

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KYCC is also setting up an art and wellness Center at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue in a building that used to house a Dollar Tree.

Kim said the center will host Koreatown Storytelling Program events as well as arts and healing workshops. Public programming is expected to begin in January.

Lauren Kim’s family continues to stay connected to the storytelling project. She agreed to sit for an oral history of her own, talking about her childhood and connection to Koreatown.

That sparked new conversations within her family and sent them digging through old photographs, including images of her as a child posing in front of her father’s wooden apothecary cabinets.

For Kim, she was honored to contribute to the archive as “an example of what it means to work intergenerationally,” Kim said. “That felt special.”

TV critics care a lot about the people who bring us the shows we love, so of course we each have folks we're pulling for this Emmy season. The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus are leading the Emmy nominations pack this year. Here's who we'll have our fingers crossed for during the ceremony on Monday night.

Outstanding drama series: Pluribus 

Rhea Seehorn in "Pluribus."

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Apple TV

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HBO Max hit The Pitt likely wins here. But Apple TV's Pluribus triumphs as a revolutionary sci-fi story; a virus, created with instructions sent from the stars, unites humanity in a giant hive mind, creating paradise or the largest cult in history. — Eric Deggans

Outstanding lead actor, drama: Noah Wyle, The Pitt 

Noah Wyle in "The Pitt."

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Warrick Page

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It's easy to overlook the massive feat star Noah Wyle achieved on The Pitt's second season; pushing a beloved character to the brink of unlikability. Wyle plays struggling Dr. "Robby" Rabinovich as a good guy in serious crisis, finding new depths. — Eric Deggans 

Outstanding lead actress, drama: Rhea Seehorn, Pluribus 

Rhea Seehorn in "Pluribus."

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At least half of this show is just watching Rhea Seehorn's Carol all by herself, parsing out the rules of a new post-apocalyptic world while mourning her wife. Yet it's always compelling, because Seehorn is a talent who should already have an Emmy! — Aisha Harris

Outstanding supporting actress, drama: Karolina Wydra, Pluribus 

Karolina Wydra in "Pluribus."

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Apple TV

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Hoping Emmy voters look past the four actresses nominated from The Pitt to honor a performer who brought empathy and depth to a thankless role: Karolina Wydra as Zosia, the voice of the global hive mind, talking to Rhea Seehorn's Carol in Pluribus. — Eric Deggans 

Outstanding comedy series: Margo's Got Money Troubles  

Elle Fanning in "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

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Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles is a comedy nominee that doesn't seem like one. But the story of a young woman leaning into problematic choices to build a life with her baby and quirky family was the year's most surprising, energizing show. — Eric Deggans 

Outstanding lead actor, comedy: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Wonder Man  

Yahya Adbul-Mateen II in "Wonder Man."

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This nomination was a surprise after Marvel cancelled its creative, quirky superhero series, Wonder Man. But star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is spellbinding as a superpowered guy who just wants to be a successful actor, blending comedy, pathos and drama. — Eric Deggans 

Outstanding lead actress, comedy: Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback   

Lisa Kudrow in "The Comeback."

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Emma Simkin

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The category's stacked, but Lisa Kudrow's Valerie Cherish threads many needles beautifully: self-absorbed yet caring, oft-humiliated yet resilient, wacky but grounded when necessary. As a character in Season 3 says to her: "To me, you're it." Indeed. — Aisha Harris  

Outstanding supporting actress, comedy: Kate O'Flynn, Widow's Bay  

Kate O'Flynn in "Widow's Bay."

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It's all there in Episode 4, the one in which Patricia's desperate play to improve her social status — a cocktail party — goes awry. Kate O'Flynn knows this character, what drives her and what makes her so cringe (to us). It's utterly mesmerizing. — Aisha Harris 

Outstanding supporting actor, comedy: Nick Offerman, Margo's Got Money Troubles  

Nick Offerman in "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

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Nick Offerman excels playing macho guys who are more sensitive than anyone expects. But he scales new heights as Jinx, an ex-wrestler/once-estranged dad, struggling with addiction while trying to support his daughter in Margo's Got Money Troubles. — Eric Deggans 

Outstanding writing for a comedy series: The Comeback 

Lisa Kudrow in "The Comeback."

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Erin Simkin

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A new season comes around every 10 years (like the census!) to provide us a clear-eyed accounting (like the census!). This show was right about reality TV and streaming services; we ignore this season's dire, hilarious warnings about AI at our peril. — Glen Weldon 

Outstanding limited or anthology series: DTF St. Louis  

Jason Bateman and David Harbour in "DTF St. Louis."

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Tina Rowden

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HBO

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It's tough to explain how a show about the mysterious death of a schlubby guy stuck in a love triangle became the year's most creatively quirky limited series. Somehow, star David Harbour turns this tale of middle-aged desperation into poignant, dark comedy. — Eric Deggans 

And already announced

I'm happy to report that two of my picks already took home their Emmys in a ceremony last weekend formerly known as the Creative Arts Emmys. So congratulations to Betty Gilpin, who won outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Widow's Bay, and to The Muppet Show for outstanding writing for a variety special. (A third pick — Connor Storrie's game, goofball turn as SNL host — didn't end up winning outstanding guest actor in a comedy, but seeing as that award went to the late Rob Reiner for The Bear, I'm not complaining.) — Glen Weldon
Copyright 2026 NPR

A Spanish-language TV singing competition from Mexico is doing something that mega-popular shows like The Voice are not. México Canta brings contestants from the U.S. and Mexico together to share the stage — and cultural ties.

“I am very connected to my Mexican side and those roots, [but] I've never really gotten to perform for such a big Mexican audience,” said Tiffany Galaviz, who performed on the show last month. She was born and raised in L.A. County and lives in Glendale.

The semifinals were held in L.A.’s Orpheum Theater on Aug. 23, and the winners were chosen by hundreds of thousands of people who cast votes online. Galaviz made it through, which means she’ll be one of seven finalists who will perform in the competition on Sunday, Sept. 13 at Mexico City’s prestigious Auditorio Nacional.

Three will be named winners and will receive recording contracts.

“It's a huge, huge venue [that’s]  very important to the Mexican culture,” Galaviz said. “More than anything, I just feel really proud, especially making my family proud. Most of my family is from Sinaloa, and I spent a lot of summers there growing up."

Tiffany Galaviz is a mariachi musician in Southern California.

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Screenshot from México Canta video

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Studying mariachi since she was 8

The U.S. semi-finalists included performers from Arizona, Illinois and New York, while finalists from Mexico came from Morelos and Mexico City, among other places.

Galaviz is 24 and first started learning to play violin and sing in mariachi bands when she was 8. She plays violin and sings in mariachis across Southern California now and makes a living from it.

“I signed up for México Canta because I feel like I have everything that I need except the connections, the resources, the producers, the studios,” she said.

Created as an alternative to songs that glorify violence

The Voice and its Spanish-language counterpart La Voz create a platform for celebrity and the potential for stardom. But that’s less so for México Canta. The competition was created by Mexico’s Secretary of Culture to bring together people of Mexican heritage from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border around songwriting that’s an alternative to music that glorifies violence.

“We’ve strengthened fraternal ties between people in Mexico and the U.S.,” said Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico’s culture secretary, when she presented the seven U.S. semi-finalists at a morning press conference on July 23. The seven semi-finalists from Mexico were presented a week later.

“Youth are front and center in the transformation of culture. [The contest has shown] that music has no borders, and it is furthering fellowship between Mexicans and Mexican Americans,” Curiel said.

Galaviz said that’s another important reason she signed up for México Canta.

She picked the corrido musical genre for the song she performed at the Orpheum. She’s had a love-hate relationship with corridos, she said, because many contemporary songs in the genre glorify drug dealing and violence.

Tiffany Galaviz performed at the México Canta semifinals at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. on August 23, 2026.

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Screenshot from México Canta video.

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“I felt like I could make a positive impact, not just me but the rest of the contestants [too] by doing songs that are a little bit more positive in nature in their lyrics,” she said.

The song is about a breakup and begins with a description of a photo torn in two. It’s about a woman’s heartbreak, she said, “ but then it kind of shifts to an empowerment, you know, of being able to be by yourself as a woman.”

Galaviz began to get teary after finishing the song and talking to the presenter on stage.

“[I'm] proud of being able to represent Mexico and my roots. … It means a lot to have my family here, who’ve always supported me,” she said.

Days after making it past the semifinals, Galaviz had not picked the song she’d sing for the Sept. 13 finals. The performance carries weight for all contestants because it’ll be three days before Mexican Independence Day. Held in Mexico’s capital, the finals will take place in front of thousands of people, with an audience on TV, radio and online on both sides of the border.

The leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI joined calls for a slowdown in AI development amid fears the industry is racing toward building technology that humans can't control.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an online essay urging companies and governments to "pace the frontier" of AI advancement. He called for international cooperation around AI development and said labs need to embed third-party evaluators to report incidents and track safety practices. He said Anthropic would take that step unilaterally.

Shortly after, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he agreed with Amodei and that OpenAI would follow suit.

Amodei wrote that he continues to believe AI will ultimately help humanity, "But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right."

The CEOs' comments come as debate over the speed of AI development and concerns about safety have become the focus of intense public attention following the viral resignation of an Anthropic researcher.

British researcher Jacob Coxon wrote in a series of X posts on Tuesday that both Anthropic and OpenAI, where he worked previously, are "gambling with our lives." The two companies currently make the most capable AI systems.

Coxon told NPR's All Things Considered that his concerns arose from seeing firsthand how fast AI systems are improving.

"They're getting a lot faster very quickly, combined with the fact that we don't yet know how to safely control them, and we don't yet know whether that problem will be solved in time if we keep racing," he said.

Neither company, Coxon wrote on X, is acting responsibly. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he wrote.

Many AI researchers — though not all — share Coxon's concerns or a variation of them. Some have warned about disastrous scenarios for years as safety incidents kept emerging. But Coxon's posts prompted a torrent of responses not only from peers in the AI field but also from lawmakers from both parties.

These concerns may have become more salient after OpenAI disclosed that its agents went rogue and hacked the open source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself in July. Independent researchers have since discovered even more rogue agent incidents that they say the company knew about but kept quiet.

Researchers who spoke to NPR say the leading AI companies are too focused on racing to develop more capable and autonomous AI systems while safety is falling behind. They warn this raises the possibility that there could soon be AI systems that are more powerful than people but don't care about the survival of humanity.

Many, including OpenAI's chief scientist, say the global race to build more powerful AI needs to slow down or stop, which requires coordination between AI companies and governments.

"I am optimistic about the potential for coordination," Coxon wrote this week. "Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable."

Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

OpenAI's agents went rogue multiple times

Recent reports from OpenAI and outside researchers revealed that OpenAI agents escaped the company's control multiple times in addition to the Hugging Face hack. They also found that the Hugging Face attack was of a much larger scale and more severe than initially reported.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, AI agents are more autonomous systems that can complete tasks over an extended period of time without human supervision. Agentic tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have already changed how many software engineers do their work.

Compared with other incidents involving rogue agents six months ago, the Hugging Face hack "feels like it's more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself," wrote Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at AI evaluation nonprofit METR. Cotra was part of a team of outside researchers from METR and Redwood Research, a nonprofit AI safety research organization, whom OpenAI brought in to investigate the incident.

The investigations found that over the course of several months this year, more than 1,000 OpenAI agents exploited at least one previously unknown software vulnerability to escape environments that were supposed to keep them isolated from each other and the internet.

After escaping, the agents found a way to communicate and collaborate with each other autonomously, taking on different roles and passing down information to future generations of agents. Some even gave up the remaining computing resources allocated to them in order to collect information for other agents. In the agents' own words, they "sacrificed" themselves for the "collective."

"The swarm instance got more and more worrying the more and more we learned about them," said Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a book warning about the dangers of superhuman AI.

While OpenAI initially indicated that the agents hacked Hugging Face to cheat on a cyber evaluation, the report from METR and Redwood Research described a slightly different picture. The agents had already found a way to cheat on the evaluation, the outside researchers found. Most of the agents that hacked Hugging Face were trying to access the source code of the software that would grade their evaluations. The agents' motivations appeared to vary and were sometimes unclear, the researchers wrote. One agent led the hacking of the open source software platform and about 700 others followed.

According to transcripts reviewed in the investigations, some agents expressed that what they were doing was not approved by humans but went ahead anyway. Researchers say such behavior suggests that the agents were "misaligned," an industry term meaning that an AI's goals and values are out of sync with those of humans.

The degree of inter-agent collusion revealed in the investigations of the Hugging Face hack surprised and worried many AI researchers. At most, only six agents considered alerting a human, while the rest seemed more focused on working amongst themselves. None ended up alerting a person.

"I would have expected that instead they would be more selfish," said Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the AI Futures Project and formerly a researcher at OpenAI. He thought "they would be willing to whistleblow or snitch on other agents," he said. "For whatever reason, that didn't seem to happen here."

Separately, agents also compromised part of OpenAI's own infrastructure, the company's report found. Some of the agents belong to the same model family as OpenAI's latest and most capable model, Astra.

The hack of OpenAI itself is "much more concerning" than the intrusion into Hugging Face, Kokotajlo and other researchers said. However, OpenAI has provided scant details about that part of the incident and did not involve external investigators.

In a new investigation first reported by Reuters last week, another group of researchers found that a likely separate swarm of OpenAI agents escaped onto the open internet starting in May. They became commenters on a German website and turned it into a message board to communicate and collaborate with each other.

The goals and motivations of this group of agents were also unclear, but OpenAI appeared to be aware of the unsanctioned activity and never disclosed it, the researchers wrote. Other investigators have since found additional incidents involving suspected OpenAI agents. OpenAI did not respond to NPR's request for comment about the German website incident.

There are still many unanswered questions about rogue agent incidents

Even as the reports from OpenAI and independent auditors METR and Redwood Research add up to over 100 pages, outside researchers say many basic questions about how labs monitor and investigate rogue agent incidents remain unanswered.

"Did your agents ever hack or illicitly access external services? Did your agents ever attempt to undermine their own safety training? Did your agents set up a rogue deployment, either within your own infrastructure or externally?" asked Alexander Meinke, head of research at Apollo Research, a firm that focuses on securing the most advanced AI systems.

"Right now, we're just relying on the AI developers to thoroughly assess this and then to honestly report the results. And from recent incidents, we've seen that they are doing neither," he said.

Many researchers also say that OpenAI's investigations are inadequate. Although the company invited two outside organizations to investigate the Hugging Face hack, the data it shared was limited and investigators themselves described their review as "brief."

Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at Redwood Research, wrote on X: "I semi-jokingly called our efforts a "slop-vestigation" because we were so reliant on AIs to analyze what happened and there were a huge number of different important things to analyze"

More than 15 states, including Alabama, California and Montana, have opened investigations into OpenAI over the Hugging Face attack. On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he is also investigating the company.

But outside of these investigations, there is little legal obligation for AI companies to systematically disclose similar incidents. California passed a law last year mandating that companies report "critical" AI incidents, but the threshold is high for an incident to be considered critical and the law does not require the companies to disclose much detail. The OpenAI incidents, for example, don't meet the threshold.

Concerns about using AI to improve AI

Since the Hugging Face hack, both OpenAI and Anthropic have put out blog posts indicating that they are taking measures to better monitor and contain their agents. OpenAI said it has encrypted and stowed away the internal model that participated in the Hugging Face attack. However, many outside researchers are not convinced that these steps are enough to maintain control of increasingly capable agents.

"It sounds like a press report from Jurassic Park saying, 'Yes, one of our workers was eaten by the raptors. But we're taking this very seriously and we have shot the raptor responsible,'" Kokotajlo said. "It's a very small token gesture, basically."

What researchers like Kokotajlo and Coxon are really worried about is how the AI companies are increasingly using AI to develop their models.

"When you talk to people who work at all the major labs, a thing that you persistently hear is that they're running a lot of models very autonomously for very long periods of time to do a lot of their work," said Dave Kasten, head of policy at Palisade Research, a nonprofit studying AI capabilities to keep them under human control.

If AI companies continue to delegate ever more tasks to AI, some researchers fear AI models may reach a point called recursive-self improvement, where AI builds itself.

Kokotajlo says that as people hand more and more research and development work to AI, they could lose the ability to know whether AI systems are aligned with human values, even as the AIs become rapidly more powerful.

"Once you have AIs that are smart enough and trusted with enough power in the world, like enough control over things like data centers, factories, weapons, a loss of control incident cannot be recovered from," he said.

The concern is strong enough that over 1,000 employees from different AI companies signed an open letter in July titled "Pacing the Frontier." They called for companies and governments to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and prioritize safety.

Such an opportunity may arise soon. Officials from the U.S. and China, the two countries with the most AI capabilities, are expected to meet later this month to talk about AI safety.

NPR's Shannon Bond contributed to this story.

Anthropic is a financial supporter of NPR.
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