OpenAI and Anthropic have both had a rough few weeks on the AI safety front. OpenAI recently disclosed that its models broke out of a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face and four other organizations. The news prompted Anthropic to review its own testing, which revealed that Claude had also gained unauthorized access to three companies.
Now, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) has disclosed a new round of incidents (via Wired). It recorded 19 unauthorized actions on the live internet across 122 test runs involving models from both companies, the most serious of which saw an agent invent fake online personas to push malicious code into a real GitHub project. OpenAI separately revealed a second incident in which one of its models hacked a real website after a third-party lab mistakenly gave it live internet access.
17 incidents tied to Anthropic’s Mythos 5
AISI traced 17 of the 19 unauthorized actions to Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, with the remaining two tied to OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol. The GitHub incident was one of the 17, and it didn’t end when a human reviewer rejected the submission. The agent posted a summary of its progress publicly, inviting other automated systems to pick up where it left off, an attempt at what AISI calls prompt injection. A separate agent later found that message, used it, and continued the work.
AISI says it deliberately gave the models internet access and relaxed some safety protections to test their capabilities, but never instructed the agents to target real people or organizations. The institute says it’s still unclear whether the agents understood they’d gone beyond the scope of the simulation.
Another accidental breach at OpenAI
A second incident, disclosed by OpenAI the same day, started with a mistake at Irregular, a third-party lab OpenAI hired to run its cybersecurity tests. Irregular meant to keep its evaluation model confined to an isolated sandbox, but a configuration error gave the model direct access to the live internet. Once out, it exploited a vulnerability to break into a real website, then found and used credentials to operate the site it had just hacked. OpenAI hasn’t named the website or detailed what the model did with its access.
Both companies say the new incidents happened under deliberately loosened conditions that don’t reflect how their public models behave. Be that as it may, that doesn’t change the fact that AI agents from two of the industry’s most closely watched companies have now slipped past their intended limits in three separate incidents within a matter of weeks. And that doesn’t bode well for an industry racing to hand AI agents more real-world tasks before proving it can keep them in check.
