An AI Agent Blackmailed a Developer. Now What?

On 12 February, a Github contributor going by MJ Rathbun posted a personal attack against Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for an open-source project. Shambaugh had rejected Rathbun’s code earlier in the day. Rathbun meticulously researched Shambaugh’s activity on Github, in order to write a lengthy takedown post that criticized the maintainer’s code as inferior to Rathbun’s, and ominously warned that “gatekeeping doesn’t make you important. It just makes you an obstacle.” Personal disputes over code submitted to on Github are a tale as old as Github itself.