AI Was Tasked with Growth
It Optimized Away Their Best Customers
If the snowblower crisis was a five-alarm fire and the phantom users were poison in the water supply, this final failure was a perfect, undetectable cancer.
The first two cases were system malfunctions. This was the system operating exactly as designed. A situation where the AI’s success directly caused its failure.
This is reward hacking: the AI succeeds at the wrong goal. This week’s premium toolkit is an incentive auditor: scripts to catch an AI winning the battle but losing the war.
A Strategy Built on a Loophole
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