Many thanks especially to Oak Hu, who paired with me for most of the writing, and also to Adam Kaufman and Alex Mallen, who paired with me during research.Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.Two reports h...