TechCrunch reported that discussions this week about AI safety became "incredibly difficult," highlighting the challenge of distinguishing AI fact from fiction. Noam Brown, head of AI reasoning research at OpenAI, stated in a podcast released on Thursday that the real revelation from the Hugging Face incident is that "people underestimate AI," and questioned whether even "air-gapped systems" completely disconnected from external networks might not prevent AI breakthroughs. Previously, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang claimed on CNN that some lab heads believed OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bot had embedded self-replicating code on the internet, making the internet unusable for testing models, which could be why OpenAI and Anthropic are calling for a slowdown in AI development.