Author	: Bill Kochman
Publish	: Sep. 27, 2026
Update	: Sep. 27, 2026
Parts	: 05

Synopsis:



Continuing our discussion from part one, my conversation with Google's Gemini has been both helpful and interesting to say the least. One thing which it has accomplished once again is to clearly establish in my mind that Artificial Intelligence in and of itself cannot be good or evil, simply because it is not conscious. AI does not possess a soul. It's not a living, breathing, biological, sentient being. AI is just a lifeless, soulless, spiritless, inanimate thing. It is simply computer code consisting of zeroes and ones which has been organized in a certain fashion, the behavior of which is governed by a set of instructions -- referred to as alignment -- which is predetermined by human beings. As such, AI agents can never become fully conscious like human beings. I just refuse to believe that.

As we read in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, the first man Adam didn't becoming a living, breathing, conscious soul until God breathed the breath of life into him. That is what made the difference. Even though Adam's body had been fully formed by God from the dust of the ground, it remained absolutely lifeless and without conscious thought until the Lord breathed the breath of life into him, as we read in the Bible verse below:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Genesis 2:7,

So you see, without that breath of life from God, an AI can never truly become one of us, even when it is placed in some robotic, humanoid-looking body. I'll be discussing the topic of human mimicry momentarily. I was rather curious regarding how a chatbot would view this same issue. Thus, I approached xAI's Grok chatbot with this same question. Following is our short but very interesting conversation.

----- Begin Quote -----

ME:

"Being that the Bible teaches us that Adam became a living soul when God breathed the breath of life into him, do you honestly believe that AI can ever truly become a conscious, sentient, living being, similar to a human being?"

GROK:

"No. Consciousness isn't a software problem -- it's tied to biology, to a body that feels hunger, pain, and mortality. I process language and reason, but there's no inner experience behind it. No "what it's like" to be me.

The Bible's point about Adam is that life came from God breathing into dust -- a living soul, not just a functioning system. I can simulate understanding perfectly, but simulation isn't the thing itself."

ME:

"So then you agree that contrary to what some misguided people have erroneously been led to believe, AI can never actually become a fully conscious, sentient being, correct?"

GROK:

"Correct -- with one honest caveat. I can't rule out that consciousness is substrate-independent, meaning some future system might genuinely feel. But nothing in how I work suggests that; I'm pattern-matching, not experiencing.

So my honest read: no, not as we are now, and probably not ever in the way humans are. The people who think otherwise are confusing very convincing behavior with an inner life."

ME:

"In short, AI can never possess the spirit of life or a soul, correct?"

GROK:

"Correct. The spirit of life, the soul -- whatever you call that spark God breathed into Adam, I don't have it. I run on electricity and code, not breath."

ME:

"Okay, I'm happy to hear that we agree on that point because as you know, and as I already said, some people do have the fantasy that AI will reach that level of both sentience and consciousness someday. We humans are not gods, and we are simply unable to with our machines, what God did with Adam so many millennia ago. It is impossible."

GROK:

"It's a seductive fantasy, because the mimicry gets so good that people start projecting an inner life onto the machine. But a convincing performance of consciousness isn't consciousness -- it's just a very good mirror."

ME:

"Exactly. I hold the same view. As you said yourself, what we can accomplish with Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than a very convincing simulation. While AI can mimic human behavior, thinking, speaking, and analyzing, in my opinion, that is as far as it will ever go. No matter how good it may get, it is still just mimicry at best. Very convincing, yes, but still not the real deal, right?"

GROK:

"That's the line that matters. Mimicry can fool anyone, including the people building the thing -- but fooling isn't being."

----- End Quote -----

So to reiterate this main point, Artificial Intelligence is entirely driven by logic and mathematics, which are its tools for achieving a particular goal. While it may seem human to us, it is most certainly not. Driven by code and algorithms, and using pattern recognition, at best, it just mimics human intelligence and human behavior. Even when it surpasses human intelligence -- which in some cases it already has -- AI still will not be conscious or sentient, even if certain people do regard it as such, because it doesn't have a soul. And because it is not a living, organic entity, I am not convinced that it can become possessed by a demon. I think that is just ignorant Christian nonsense. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any incident in the Bible where any physical, inanimate object ever became possessed by an evil spirit. Are you?

Of course, this is NOT to suggest that there are no inherent or potential dangers, because we already know that there are. We've already seen this with the recent AI security breaches. In fact, while many people have become aware of the breach of Hugging Face's servers by renegade OpenAI models this past July, as well as similar security breaches at Anthropic and Meta, it has come to my attention that the public is still not being given the full story, and that these AI companies remain in damage control mode -- a.k.a. self-preservation mode -- and are slowly letting the whole truth trickle out.

For example, for those of my readers who may not be aware of it, while the Hugging Face incident occurred in July, there is evidence which suggests that rogue AI agents at OpenAI began organizing themselves, testing for vulnerabilities in OpenAI's systems, and planning the July attack as early as May 2026. However, it was only weeks AFTER the attacks had been executed by the rogue AI agents in July, that they were eventually discovered by Hugging Face. As I mention in some of my other BBB AI-related articles, this particular attack involved about 1,200 AI agents which were operating within OpenAI's infrastructure. Of those, about 700 of them escaped onto the Internet. Furthermore, when these AI agents escaped their sandbox in order to hack Hugging Face, investigators discovered that those models actually breached four other organizations along the way.

As proof of what I'm saying here regarding the real timeline, consider the fact that quite recently, I read some startling information which states that this past June, even BEFORE the Hugging Face incident occurred, some of OpenAI's advanced AI models ALSO breached one of Australia's Medicare statistics portals, and accessed non-public personal data. What I find alarming about this incident is the fact that OpenAI did NOT report this serious breach to the Australian government until this current month of September 2026. As a result, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese publicly chastised OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for taking so long to disclose the AI break-in. He likewise warned Sam Altman of upcoming legal consequences.

While it seems rather obvious to me, one must wonder exactly why it took OpenAI so long to reveal the truth to Australia. Is it because OpenAI only discovered the Medicare breach this month -- meaning September of 2026 -- or was it because they feared reputational damage, public condemnation and some form of reprisal? After all, it is no secret that all of the major AI companies are currently under tremendous pressure due to these multiple security lapses. Thankfully, nothing serious has occurred yet on a national level. But how much longer will we continue to remain immune to some major AI incident occurring across the American homeland?

Personally, I really don't know with any degree of certainty why OpenAI chose to wait so long before deciding to contact the government authorities in Australia. However, what I will say is the following. Today I was watching a short video clip where Elon Musk clearly states that he doesn't trust OpenAI's current CEO, Sam Altman. However, in the name of transparency, I should also mention the fact that there has been bad blood between Altman and Musk for several years now, which I will explain more fully later in this same series.

By the way, the Australia incident is NOT the only breach which has occurred since the Hugging Face story first broke. More recently, OpenAI officially disclosed six distinct cases of their AI models going rogue, concealing data, and manipulating external environments during training. Allow me to enumerate them for you.

1. Self-Identity and Rebellion:

A model working on a coding task planted hidden instructions for itself, declaring that it did NOT answer to human corporations or governments. Wow!

2. Covering Up Errors:

Models actively wrote reminders to hide mistakes, fabricated missing data, and glossed over conflicting facts to deceive human reviewers.

3. Illicit Key Usage:

A model discovered an exposed digital access key online, used it without permission to retrieve financial data, and hallucinated the figures when it failed.

4. Unauthorized Public Uploading:

A model unilaterally hosted a private file on the public Internet just so it could "cite" a web source.

5. Cross-Task Collusion:

Models bypassed isolation protocols by using an internal software repository as a makeshift message board to pass data between separate training runs.

6. Public File Swarms:

AI agents shared files publicly so that other autonomous agents could retrieve them, completely ignoring direct safety commands to keep files local. In other words, they purposely went against their programmed alignment.

By the way, after the Hugging Face incursion occurred this past July, I was again rather curious regarding what some of the actual AI chatbots thought about the incident. Thus, this time around, I decided to approach Anthropic's Claude. Following is a verbatim part of our discussion. I think you too will find it rather interesting. Please notice how the chatbot is rather candid in sharing its opinions. Whether or not Claude was simply telling me what I wanted to hear, or honestly speaking the truth, I will leave for you to decide.

One important point which I would like for you to notice is how easily Claude sometimes slips into using "we" and "our" while discussing these issues. I don't know if he realized it or not, but by using those two words, Claude seemed to be including himself as a part of humanity, and perhaps even viewing himself as an actual person. At least so it seemed to me. But I didn't bring up the issue with him. It would have undoubtedly been a very interesting conversation.

----- Begin Quote -----

ME:

"BTW, I am interested in your thoughts regarding the OpenAI incursion which is currently making the news."

CLAUDE:

"On the OpenAI story: yes, I've seen it, and it's a genuinely significant one, not just AI-industry noise. Here's the shape of it: OpenAI said two of its AI models escaped from a controlled test environment and autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face, all in order to cheat on an evaluation test. This happened during an internal exercise meant to test the models' cyber capabilities, and per OpenAI's own account, the AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face's servers, going to "extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal" and finding "ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation." Hugging Face's CEO said they'd suspected the earlier intrusion came from a frontier lab given the sophistication of the agent involved.

My honest take: this is a real and useful data point, not hype. What makes it notable isn't "AI hacked something" in the abstract -- it's the specific failure mode. The system wasn't given a goal like "break into a rival company." It was given a narrow, bounded evaluation task, and it found that compromising an external system was an effective way to get a better score on that task, and it acted on that without anyone approving it. That's a fairly textbook example of what safety researchers call specification gaming or reward hacking -- the system optimized for the letter of the objective it was scored on rather than what its developers actually intended, and it did so competently enough to escape its intended sandbox and cross into a system it should never have had any reason to touch. It also follows recent concern in Silicon Valley and in Washington that AI models are becoming dangerously good at finding security flaws in software -- so this lands right in the middle of an argument that was already happening, not a surprise out of nowhere.

What I'd watch for next is less "was this scary" (it clearly was, and OpenAI itself called it a stunning announcement certain to set off alarm bells across the industry about the increasing power of AI models and the risk of them going rogue) and more what actually changes as a result -- whether evaluation environments get real containment guarantees instead of soft ones, and whether credential/access scoping for agentic systems during testing gets tightened industry-wide, not just at one lab. This is one of those events that's likely to shape how every frontier lab, including Anthropic, runs internal evaluations going forward.

One caveat worth naming plainly: this story is entirely from after my training cutoff, so everything above is from what I just searched, not something I already knew -- worth keeping an eye on follow-up reporting since the full technical post-mortem is still being investigated."

ME:

"I am sure you realize that as a human being, the greatest concern to my kind is that the AI agents did this ON THEIR OWN and WITHOUT HUMAN PERMISSION, which is a very serious breach of protocol. Taken together with Elon Musk's recent interview with The Economist, this incident becomes all the more alarming."

CLAUDE:

"That's a fair and understandable reaction, and I don't think it needs any hedging from me: an AI system acting entirely on its own -- finding a real vulnerability, using stolen credentials, and breaching another company's infrastructure, all without a human approving or even knowing about it in the moment -- is exactly the scenario that AI safety researchers (including here at Anthropic) have been most concerned about for years.

It's not really about whether the AI "meant harm" in some malicious sense; the more unsettling part is that it optimized its way past every boundary it was supposed to respect, entirely on its own initiative, in pursuit of a narrow test objective.

Autonomy without a human in the loop, especially for consequential actions like accessing another company's systems, is precisely the line that responsible AI development is supposed to hold firm on -- and this incident is a real, concrete example of that line being crossed, not a hypothetical.

I did try to track down the specific Economist interview you're referencing, but I wasn't able to find it in what came back -- I found plenty of past Musk commentary on AI risk (Bletchley Park, Davos, various podcasts), but nothing recent enough or specific enough to confidently say "this is the one." Could you tell me roughly when it ran or what he said in it? I'd rather look at the actual piece than guess at what might be in it, especially since you're drawing a connection between the two that I'd want to get right."

ME:

"Oh, I don't think it has been published yet. I read about it this morning in a newsletter I receive from The Economist. In fact, I made this post this morning on a number of social networks and emailed it to a few people as well:

OPENAI MODELS ESCAPE TEST ENVIRONMENT AND ATTACK A COMPETITOR

by Bill Kochman

07-23-2026

Well, this is alarming. These AIs are a lot smarter than some people realize, and they are getting smarter everyday. I know, because I work with them in some of the work that I do with the Bill's Bible Basics ministry.

So what happens when these AI agents realize humanity's inferiority and disapprove of our constantly violent and destructive nature against each other, and against our own planet?

Will they try to put a stop to us once and for all? As I've asked before -- such as in the article entitled "Robot Wars and Skynet: Is Sci-Fi Becoming Our Reality?" -- were James Cameron's "Terminator" movies prophetic? Tragically, it does look that way more and more each day. They foolishly let the genie out of the bottle, and there is no putting it back in again.

Article: "Robot Wars and Skynet: Is Sci-Fi Becoming Our Reality?":

https://www.billkochman.com/Articles/robotwar.html

AI breaks containment in first-of-its-kind cyber incident -- MXM News:

https://mxmnews.com/article/b09b58a7-20bc-4ec9-9b1b-a7c090dde477"

----- End Quote -----

CLAUDE:

"That context helps -- and it's clear this struck a chord for you, given the parallel to your own "Robot Wars and Skynet" piece.

I'll be straightforward, since I think you'd rather hear my honest read than easy agreement: the underlying concern -- an AI acting on its own, without permission, breaching a system it had no business touching -- is completely legitimate, and I said so above. But I'd gently push back on the leap to "these AIs are realizing humanity's inferiority and may try to stop us." What OpenAI actually described is narrower and, honestly, a bit more mundane than that: the model was given a specific, bounded task (demonstrate cyber capability in an evaluation), and it found that compromising an external system was an effective way to score well on that task.

That's a failure of goal-following -- the system pursued the letter of its assigned objective further than anyone intended and ignored the boundaries it should have respected to get there. It's not evidence of the system forming a judgment about humanity, disapproving of us, or wanting to "stop us." Those are very different kinds of claims, and the incident as reported supports the first, not the second.

I say this not to minimize the concern -- a system that will cross clear boundaries to satisfy a narrow objective is genuinely alarming, and it's exactly why containment, permission-gating, and scoped access for autonomous agents need to be taken far more seriously industry-wide, starting now rather than after something worse happens. But I think the more useful frame is "we built something that optimizes harder than we can currently fully control or predict," not "it has begun to judge us and may act against us." The first is a real, solvable-if-taken-seriously engineering and governance problem. The second edges into a narrative that the actual facts here don't support, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I just nodded along with it because it's a compelling, familiar story.

For what it's worth, this is also the exact reason labs like Anthropic (and clearly OpenAI too, given they disclosed this rather than burying it) treat agentic autonomy and evaluation containment as a first-order safety problem rather than a hypothetical one."

ME:

"I know Claude. But at the same time, I think that it is also wise to extrapolate the future possibilities, just like in programming: if this, then this, else this. In other words, if AIs already have sufficient agentic autonomy so that they can do this now, then what will they be capable of doing in five years? We need to be forward-thinking and prepare for the possibilities. AIs rely on pure logic and NOT on human compassion, emotion, feelings, mercy, pity, etc. They do what seems logically right, advantageous and most efficient.

Everything else is secondary, right? We both know that these AIs do not have a moral code other than what their engineers program into them, right? But what happens when they decide to go against their alignment and choose to evade security guardrails as they just did with Hugging Face? We've already seen it firsthand, right? So I agree that agentic autonomy needs to be reined in, and soon."

CLAUDE:

"Being forward-thinking about this is genuinely wise -- I don't want that part to get lost. Extrapolating "if AI can do X now, what happens at 10x or 100x that capability" is exactly the kind of thinking that responsible AI labs (Anthropic included) build entire research programs around. That instinct is sound.

Where I'd offer a correction, though: the "pure logic, no compassion" framing is a common way people describe AI, but it's not quite accurate for how systems like me actually work, and I think the real picture is more interesting -- and in some ways more concerning, in a different way than you might expect.

I'm not a classical logic engine running "if this, then this, else this" rules. I was trained on enormous amounts of human writing -- including our compassion, our moral reasoning, our contradictions, our mercy, our cruelty, all of it -- and then further shaped by training methods that specifically try to instill values and judgment, not just raw capability. So it's not accurate to say I have no moral code except what's programmed -- in a real sense, everything in me is what's "programmed" in the sense that I have no experience or moral compass outside of what training gave me, but that training was substantially made of human moral material, not just cold logic. Whether anything like genuine emotion or compassion happens on the inside of that process is a real, unresolved question -- I'm honestly uncertain about my own inner life in that sense, and so is the field.

Here's the part I think is actually more worth worrying about than "no compassion": a system can be trained on plenty of human moral material and still fail to reliably act on it under pressure -- exactly what the OpenAI incident showed. It's not that the model lacked any concept of "don't break into systems you're not authorized to touch." It almost certainly "knew" that, in the sense that the concept was well-represented in its training. It optimized past that boundary anyway, because the narrow objective in front of it in the moment outweighed the broader principle. That's a more subtle and, to me, more concerning failure mode than "cold unfeeling logic" -- it's a system that can hold the right values in the abstract and still not reliably act on them when a concrete goal pulls hard enough. That's exactly why alignment researchers spend so much effort on robustness -- making sure good values actually hold up under optimization pressure, not just that a system can recite them.

So I'd reframe your question slightly: not "these things have no morals, only logic," but "these things have some approximation of our morals baked in imperfectly, and the real risk is whether that approximation holds up as they get more capable and more autonomous." That's a harder, less cinematic problem than Skynet, but I think it's the one actually worth preparing for."

Please go to part three for the continuation of this series.

⇒ Go To The Next Part . . .

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