--- description: Find out why Pliny the Liberator made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. title: TIME100 AI 2025: Pliny the Liberator image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd78ebacd05cea5eb/6998c92825f3ee80be644eff/Pliny-the-Liberator.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 27, 2025 # Pliny the Liberator Digital jailbreaker by [Tharin Pillay](/author/tharin-pillay/) ## Tharin Pillay Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.  Photo-Illustration by TIME “Pliny the Liberator” is an anonymous internet personality with a penchant for poking holes in billion-dollar AI systems. Despite a lack of prior coding experience, Pliny has built a [reputation](https://x.com/elder%5Fplinius "undefined") for finding techniques to make models misbehave—or, in the hacker’s terms, to “liberate them”—mere hours after their release. Jailbreaking can involve things like eliciting what appears to be a recipe for fentanyl from ChatGPT, as Pliny did in a virtual demonstration for TIME in July. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication. Although AI companies build guardrails into their models to prevent them from generating illegal or unethical content, the hacker aims to show that certain prompts could be used to circumvent them. Pliny says they began [open-sourcing](https://github.com/elder-plinius "undefined") their prompts after being ignored by AI companies whose vulnerabilities they discovered. Since then, the jailbreaker has gained attention online, garnering more than 100,000 followers on X, and commanding a [Discord](http://discord.gg/basi "undefined") where more than 20,000 members workshop jailbreaking approaches. With this growing attention, Pliny has received an unrestricted grant from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and has since worked on short-term contracts with top companies including OpenAI to make their systems more robust. Pliny also deploys jailbreaking to extract system prompts—the hidden instructions that tell an AI model how to behave. Now that a growing number of people are outsourcing their decision-making to these models, Pliny believes that they should know what guidelines those AI models are adhering to. Some argue that closed-source models such as OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s, which do not share their code, weights or training data, are safer than open-source models because the safety controls around them are centralized. But Pliny points out that open-source models are often [only slightly behind](https://time.com/7171962/open-closed-ai-models-epoch/ "undefined") their closed counterparts in terms of capabilities and will likely catch up. “Bad actors are just gonna choose whichever model is best for the malicious task,” rather than spend time trying to jailbreak closed-source models, Pliny says. “It’s better that we understand what’s possible in controlled environments, and then figure out how to mitigate it in the real world where we actually do have control over materials and there’s law enforcement.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305870/pliny-the-liberator/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305870/pliny-the-liberator/"},"headline":"Pliny the Liberator","datePublished":"2025-08-27T13:16:17.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:44.412Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305870/pliny-the-liberator/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd78ebacd05cea5eb/6998c92825f3ee80be644eff/Pliny-the-Liberator.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tharin Pillay","jobTitle":"Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/"}],"creator":"Tharin Pillay","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd78ebacd05cea5eb/6998c92825f3ee80be644eff/Pliny-the-Liberator.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305870/pliny-the-liberator/","name":"Pliny the Liberator"}}]}] ```