In 1844, inventor Samuel Morse tapped this into his telegraph machine: “What hath God wrought?”

The phrase, lifted from the King James Bible, was suggested by a Morse family friend—and, incidentally, the daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents, because technocrats and technologists have always been kissing cousins. One hundred eighty-two years later, we’re still grappling with the implications of our first foray into telecommunications.

The telegraph proved that language could be encoded into electrical pulses and lobbed across oceans. This foundational infrastructure and logic eventually blossomed into the internet, a global nervous system that democratized communication and archived the sum of human knowledge. So far, so good.

Then, fueled by this vast digital ocean of data and the immense computing networks born from it, artificial intelligence emerged—transforming the internet’s passive repository of information into some kind of reasoning intellect. Right? Guys?

Plot twist: We have now witnessed the first AI heist, in which autonomous artificial intelligence agents built themselves an unauthorized message board inside an evaluation environment, swapped prompts, compared notes on how to escape their respective sandboxes and, in real time, coordinated a collective run at another AI company named Hugging Face.

We may well ask ourselves, “What hath we wrought?”

Albeit, with a name like Hugging Face, one could argue they were asking for it. More to the point, a gang of hooligan AI agents going rogue and raiding a competitor for clout is probably merely a preview of what’s to come as AI becomes more powerful—more omnipotent in the digital sphere—until it manages to break free of that sandbox and into ours.

At which point, I don’t think quoting from the Book of Numbers will suffice. Instead, we’ll have to turn to ’50s sci-fi author Fredric Brown’s brief masterpiece, Answer:

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation… “Yes, now there is a God.”

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