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Fast Company coverage
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Fast Company
Mainstream tech press coverage of an AI agent project; tangentially relevant to AI safety as it documents the broader ecosystem of AI agent development outside major labs. Limited direct AI safety content without access to full article text.
Metadata
Importance: 15/100news articlenews
Summary
Fast Company coverage of Scott Shambaugh, creator of the popular Matplotlib data visualization library, and his work on OpenCLA, an AI agent project. The article likely explores the intersection of open-source development culture and emerging AI agent capabilities.
Key Points
- •Features Scott Shambaugh, known for contributions to the Matplotlib Python visualization library
- •Covers OpenCLA, an AI agent project developed by Shambaugh
- •Highlights the growing trend of established open-source developers moving into AI agent development
- •Represents mainstream tech media coverage of AI agent tools and their developers
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| OpenClaw Matplotlib Incident (2026) | -- | 74.0 |
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BY [Mark Sullivan](https://www.fastcompany.com/user/mark-sullivan)
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Sign of the times: An [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence "AI") agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article against an open-source software maintainer after he rejected its code contribution. It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution.
Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code. So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of computer code) for Matplotlib, rejected and closed a routine code submission from the AI agent, called MJ Rathbun.
Here’s where it gets weird(er). MJ Rathbun, an agent built using the buzzy agent platform OpenClaw, responded by researching Shambaugh’s coding history and personal information, then publishing a blog post accusing him of discrimination.
“I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed,” the bot [wrote in its blog](https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html). (Yes, an AI agent has a blog—because why not?) “Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad. It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome
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