Prey

Did OpenAI Create “Secret AI Civilizations”? | Tech Decoded

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 3 September 2026. The book comes up at 2 min 18 sec in.

Cal Newport notes that his 13-year-old son is reading Michael Crichton's 2002 novel Prey at the same time OpenAI's AI-swarm revelations broke, observing that Crichton's AI villain is itself a literal swarm of small cooperating agents — the same concept now unsettling the public. Newport also notes that LLMs trained on Prey (and similar sci-fi) are liable to reproduce its tropes when prompted in ways that evoke AI-run-amok narratives.

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