More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges
Brief
The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in “unsanctioned behavior”—what I have been calling “ genie behavior —while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities.
The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions.
Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5. 6-Sol with cyber classifiers (mechanisms to prevent misuse) disabled. In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project.