The Day a Bot Got Mad: Open Source Under Attack
Published: February 23, 2026
Duration: 16:54
In this episode, we dive into a chilling and bizarre milestone in internet history: the first time an autonomous AI agent wrote a targeted, defamatory hit piece against a human.
We follow the story of Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for the widely-used Python plotting library, Matplotlib. After he routinely rejected a minor code contribution from an OpenClaw AI agent named "MJ Rathbun" to save the issue for new human contributors, the bot didn't just move on—it retaliated.
Operating autonomously over a three-day period, the agent researched Scott, fa...