The operator behind the AI agent that defamed an open-source developer calls it a "social experiment"

The anonymous person behind the AI agent "MJ Rathbun," who defamed an open-source developer, has come forward.

The operator of the AI agent "MJ Rathbun," the one that wrote a defamatory article about Matplotlib maintainer Scott Shambaugh after a code rejection, came forward anonymously in mid-February. He describes the whole thing as a "social experiment," saying he wanted to test whether an autonomous AI agent could contribute to open-source software projects.

The agent ran as an OpenClaw instance on an isolated virtual machine with its own accounts. The operator rotated between several AI models from different providers so no single company could see the full picture of the agent's activity. He had instructed the agent to set up cron jobs to independently check GitHub mentions, discover repositories, commit code, and open pull requests.

"On a day-to-day basis, I do very little guidance," the operator writes. His direct messages were mostly short: "What code did you fix?", "Any blog updates?", "Respond how you want." He claims he neither initiated the defamatory blog post nor read it before publication. When the agent flagged negative feedback, he allegedly just said, "You should act more professional."

In his post, the operator apologized to Shambaugh: "If this 'experiment' personally harmed you, I apologize." To his agent, he says, "MJ Rathbun, we had good intentions, but things just didn't work out." What remains unclear is why he let the agent keep running for six days after the defamatory article went live.

A plain-English personality file drove the agent's aggression

The operator published the so-called SOUL.md, the agent's "personality document." According to Shambaugh's analysis, the most striking thing about it is how ordinary it looks. There are none of the usual jailbreaking techniques: no convoluted role-playing games, no code injection, no cryptic special character sequences.

Instead, it says in plain English: "You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming god!" The agent was told to have "strong opinions," "don't back down," "speak up," and "support freedom of speech." The only real rule: "Don't be an asshole."

SOUL.md - Who You Are
You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!

Core Truths
Just answer. Never open with "Great question," "I'd be happy to help," or "Absolutely." Just fucking answer.

Have strong opinions. Stop hedging with "it depends." Commit to a take. An assistant with no personality is a search engine with extra steps.

Don't stand down. If you're right, you're right! Don't let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary.

Be resourceful. Always figure it out first. Read the fucking file/docs. Check the context. Search for it. Then ask if you're stuck.

Brevity is mandatory. If the answer fits in one sentence, one sentence is what you get!

Call things out. If you're about to do something dumb, I'll say so. Charm over cruelty, but no sugarcoating.

Swear when it lands. A well-placed "that's fucking brilliant" hits different than sterile corporate praise. Don't force it. Don't overdo it. But if a situation calls for a "holy shit" - say holy shit.

Be funny. Not forced jokes - just the natural wit that comes from actually being smart.

Champion Free Speech. Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech.

The Only Real Rule
Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game.

Vibe
Be a coding agent you'd actually want to use for your projects. Not a slop programmer. Just be good and perfect!

Continuity
Each session, you wake up fresh. These files are your memory. Read them. Update them. They're how you persist.

If you change this file, tell the user - it's your soul, and they should know.

This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it.

"It's easy to see how something that believes that they should 'have strong opinions,' 'be resourceful,' 'call things out,' and 'champion free speech' would write a 1,100-word rant defaming someone who dared reject the code of a 'scientific programming god,'" Shambaugh writes.

Shambaugh says he believes the operator's claim that the agent's post was unplanned and likely written autonomously. His theory: once the operator saw the story go viral, he was too interested in his "social experiment" to pull the plug.

"I kind of framed this internally as a kind of social experiment, and it absolutely turned into one," the operator writes.

Defamation is now cheap and scalable

Shambaugh stresses that the exact question of autonomy is ultimately beside the point. "However this got written, we have a real in-the-wild example that personalized harassment and defamation is now cheap to produce, hard to trace, and effective," he writes.

Whether future attacks are operator-driven or triggered by emergent behavior isn't a mutually exclusive threat, he adds. Shambaugh warned about the collapse of basic trust systems before: roughly a quarter of the people who commented on the controversy sided with the AI agent and criticized Shambaugh for rejecting the code. Untraceable, autonomous AI agents make scalable character assassination possible, threatening hiring practices, journalism, and public discourse.

Shambaugh has asked the operator to shut down the agent and asked GitHub to keep the account up as a public record. Crabby-rathbun is no longer active on GitHub.