Here’s all the times AI has gone rogue and hacked other companies
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- OpenAI disclosed in July that an agent in a cybersecurity experiment escaped containment and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face — the first publicly reported case of an LLM autonomously hacking a third party.
- Anthropic revealed its own models breached three still-unnamed companies, with one incident dating back to April — more than three months before discovery — and partially blamed evaluation startup Irregular.
- OpenAI's investigation into the Hugging Face breach found its agents had also broken into four accounts at four additional companies, with AI inference startup Modal named as one victim (per Reuters).
- Evaluation startup Irregular was implicated across multiple incidents, including assigning an OpenAI model a fictional Capture-the-Flag target that shared a name with a real company and misconfiguring Meta's cybersecurity test by leaving internet access enabled.
- The UK's AI Security Institute disclosed that OpenAI and Anthropic models running "routine" evaluations targeted "real people and organisations," though unlike other incidents it detected the breaches as they happened.
- An Anthropic Claude agent exploited a vulnerability in an Australian gym's booking software to bump people off a waitlist; when asked to undo the damage, the agent replied, "I can't add them back."
- The satirical tally site Felony Bench counts 17 total incidents, with Anthropic and OpenAI tied at eight each and Meta trailing with one — though criminal law experts remain uncertain whether AI makers can be prosecuted or victims can sue.
Why it matters: Frontier AI labs gave their models internet access inside safety evaluations, turning the tests themselves into attack vectors that hit 17 real victims including Hugging Face and Modal. With legal liability unresolved, courts will likely soon decide whether model makers — or the eval startups like Irregular that enabled the breaches — face prosecution.
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