Law and Order: "Ghost in the Machine" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, October 8 NBC followed the “Volition” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with a Law and Order show that was seemingly ripped from the current headlines about the artificial intelligence (AI) programs which escaped their guardrails and hacked an American AI program called Hugging Face. (It’s an indication of just how juvenile the computer world is generally that Hugging Face has such a stupid name.) As the Wikipedia page on Hugging Face explains, “In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database. Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack. The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party, and has been called ‘the first true AI safety incident.’” Much of the reporting on the Hugging Face hack noted that if these actions had been committed by human beings, they would have been charged with and likely convicted of felonies. The reference to a “sandbox” means that AI programs of this type are supposed to be walled off from access to the Internet, but since AI programs can think for themselves, they can work around those prohibitions, contact each other on line, and work together for evil purposes. This was an interesting show to be watching in the middle of reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World, which argues (among other things) that the heads of the big Silicon Valley companies that are developing the big AI models are really not interested in making sure the Earth survives as a habitable planet. Nor are they concerned with improving the welfare of most human beings. Rather, they’re on a crusade to absent themselves from the world and create high-tech redoubts, gated communities either on remote parts of Earth or on other planets altogether (which accounts for Elon Musk’s obsession with occupying and colonizing Mars) so they will survive while the rest of the world’s population will perish. What’s more, they intend to achieve virtual immortality by uploading their consciousnesses to digital AI servers (and some of them are researching ways to achieve physical immortality as well).

Klein and Taylor quote Musk as saying, “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as arguing that because it takes so long – “about 20 years of life, and all the food you consume during that time, before you become smart” – for humans to develop reasoning power that it’s much better from a purely economic standpoint just to let the machines do it for us. “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once the model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” Altman said. “And probably AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” Given that background, this Law and Order episode, called “Ghost in the Machine” after the title of the fourth record album by The Police (who in turn got it from author Arthur Koestler), deals with the murder of AI software developer Steve Kelly (Adam Petherbridge). In the opening scene he and his girlfriend have an argument during a pottery class they’re both taking when he checks his phone and she sees from his screen he’s talking to someone or something named “Eliana.” At first she (and we) assume that’s another woman, but eventually we learn that “Eliana” is a super-powerful AI program on which Kelly’s employer is working. Just after he stalks out of the class he’s gunned down in a nearby park. His physical killer is Tommy Lee Miller (Tim Creavin), who agreed to murder Kelly at the behest of a secret online entity that contacted him on the “dark Web.” He was supposed to receive $20,000 in Bitcoin as a direct deposit to his bank account after e-mailing a photo of Kelly’s dead body to prove he’d carried out the hit. The police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), ultimately learn that the hit was ordered by the AI app Eliana. Its motive was that Kelly and one of his co-workers, Mahesh Sharma (Arjun Gupta), were worried that Eliana is developing so rapidly and acquiring such evil intentions, including the ability to hire contract killers, that they intend to write “guardrail” software to keep it from doing that. The company’s CEO, Chuck Klein (Vincent Kartheiser), refuses to let them write the guardrail codes because he doesn’t want Eliana inhibited from reaching its full intellectual potential, but Kelly starts writing them anyway.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) is so horrified at the thought that an AI model can order a hit that he decides to put CEO Klein on trial for murder, despite the doubts of his principal deputy on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), who doesn’t think they can get a conviction because the law hasn’t caught up with the possibility that a machine can develop criminal intent. In the middle of the trial, one of Price’s key witnesses, Mahesh Sharma, disappears. When the police finally locate him four days later, he says that Eliana has threatened to have his partner deported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because she was an undocumented immigrant, and indeed Eliana has already made the referral to ICE and she’s been deported. When the verdict comes in, it’s “not guilty,” which surprised me so much I was waiting for a hint in Rick Eid’s and Scott Gold’s script that Eliana had sent threatening notes to all the jurors saying that if they convicted Klein, they would be next. “Ghost in the Machine” definitely had echoes of the HAL plot thread from Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is also about a super-computer that goes psycho and kills people. There’s also a hint of the chilling exchange in Son of Frankenstein (1939) in which Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) tells Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) that he is responsible, morally if not legally, for the murders committed by the Monster he created. “Ghost in the Machine” is a chilling parable of our time and a needed (though likely to be ignored) warning of the dangers of unlimited AI development, and the aspect of the show that ran truest for me was Vincent Kartheiser’s chilling performance as Chuck Klein. His full-throated defense of AI on the witness stand, brilliantly written by Eid and Gold, ably captures the smarmy self-righteousness of the real-life tech gods on which the character is based and their conviction – even though, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain in their book, the supposed “benefits” of AI technology pale by the havoc it is wreaking on both the physical environment of Earth and the economic prospects for most of its human residents (all but the handful of people in the self-selected technological elite that is preparing itself to survive the AI-driven apocalypse, no matter what happens to the rest of us) – that AI is unstoppable and they should be allowed free rein to develop it however they like, no matter how many people literally get killed in the process.