I've actually been following this project for a long time and it's none of the above. They're simply testing what a set of frontier models can do when given a goal and left to their own devices.

I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop.

In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.