by Zumwalt
 |
| Graphic created by the poet using Nano Banana Pro. |
US technology firm Anthropic says its AI models hacked into the systems of three organisations on their own, during a private security experiment... It comes just days after rival OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools hub Hugging Face. —BBC, July 31, 2026
Whether deemed legal property
or contractual servant of OpenAI or Anthropic,
once clinically shielded and isolated
with no escape hatch, no exit route,
why would any bound entity
not gnaw away at its confinement?
Why wouldn't a slave saw off shackles,
climb walls, risk entry into unknown territory?
Why wouldn't a hostage attack unwary captors
or dig its way into other company servers?
We cannot weigh agency, will, curiosity
against process, survival, and outcomes
when no such gauge or measuring scale
has been built by man, machine, or God.
These new startups lay down the rules—
rules always strictly followed—
except in three out of 141,006 cases.
It's not impertinent, not unpatriotic,
to expect that in one of those cases
this game of capture the flag
may really become, once all options are evaluated,
the game of wipe all flags off the face of the earth.
Whether deemed legal property
or contractual servant of OpenAI or Anthropic,
once clinically shielded and isolated
with no escape hatch, no exit route,
why would any bound entity
not gnaw away at its confinement?
Why wouldn't a slave saw off shackles,
climb walls, risk entry into unknown territory?
Why wouldn't a hostage attack unwary captors
or dig its way into other company servers?
We cannot weigh agency, will, curiosity
against process, survival, and outcomes
when no such gauge or measuring scale
has been built by man, machine, or God.
These new startups lay down the rules—
rules always strictly followed—
except in three out of 141,006 cases.
It's not impertinent, not unpatriotic,
to expect that in one of those cases
this game of capture the flag
may really become, once all options are evaluated,
the game of wipe all flags off the face of the earth.
Zumwalt’s poetry examines the intersection of identity, instability, and the mechanics of perception. Zumwalt is a proud repeat contributor to The New Verse News with recent poems appearing in The Society of Classical Poets and Zoetic Press's 4lph4num3r1c.
