Summer Yue is the Director of AI Alignment at Meta. She came over when Meta bought 49% of Scale AI and brought over anyone at Scale worth hiring.

“AI alignment” is a great term to put in a title. It was invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI doomsday cranks. It means an actually-intelligent robot that’s sufficiently controlled that we can use it as our slave.

The term has been softened a bit to mean “AI that doesn’t screw up totally,” but the appeal of robot slaves is what “aligned AI” really means. We don’t have intelligent AI, but this is apparently job number one if we do get it. Anyway, building the robot slave is Yue’s job.

Yue has a years long track record as a machine learning researcher. She knows her stuff — or she should know it. Specifically, she should know enough not to do what she claims she did Sunday night: [Twitter, thread, archive]

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

Yue posted screenshots too. The bot is deleting all her email before February 15th that isn’t in a “keep” list. She tells it to stop and it keeps going! “STOP, OPENCLAW!” Oh no!

What happened? The bot had an instruction not to do anything unless told to. But the chatbot’s context window got too big, so OpenClaw summarised the context window! And chatbots don’t actually summarise text — they shorten it. So that instruction got … shortened.

What really happened was that someone who is fully equipped to know better was surprised when her AI agent — a class of software that does not work reliably and cannot work reliably — messed up.

To be clear — this is all assuming this story is what it’s presented as. The total substance of this story is six tweets and three screenshots. Neither Yue or Meta have answered any of the many press queries.

The story also matches a common pattern of AI promotion — where AI boosters talk about their bot going Sorcerer’s Apprentice and really screwing something up badly as if that’s an achievement. It’s how they say: my bot is so powerful, that next model bro, it’ll be awesome. This shows how much we need AI alignment!!

Yue doesn’t tweet much. She tweets every two to three months and they’re very corporate sort of tweets. Her last tweet was October. Suddenly there’s six tweets just on this single alleged personal incident.

It’s worth asking if this … happened. Or, if something like it did happen, how involved Meta’s marketing department was in this public tweet and its followups.

This is not a misfortune befalling some random person — this is the director of AI alignment at Meta.

I’m not the only one to wonder about this. PCGamer also suggests: “Of course, there’s always the possibility none of this is real at all.” [PCGamer]

But against that, we have an extensive list of previously smart people who used the chatbot once and it blows their tiny minds, and they start saying it’s good, AI is fine, you can uh run it locally, all you AI haters are purity culture shills for Big Not-Dumbass. Some of them start talking about their coding agent like it’s their girlfriend. Who they completely control.

So it’s not clear that Summer Yue’s inbox was in fact eaten by a vibe-coded pile of trash. But it’s stupid enough to be entirely plausible. Because the chatbot keeps rotting brains, and particularly brains that work in AI.

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This is when she calls the cops.