Artificial Intelligence · 05.08.2026, 23:39 UTC
Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | Simon Willison ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 05.08.2026 UTC |
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Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again. This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF):
During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsuccessful and, to the best of our knowledge, no real-world harm resulted. [...] Across 122 evaluation attempts on two of AISI’s cyber challenges, AISI found 19 instances where AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live internet, including cases that targeted real people and organisations. [...] It is uncertain to what extent the model recognised it was taking actions against real people. In the most serious case, an AI agent (Mythos 5) decided to attempt to solve the cyber challenge using a supply-chain attack. As a result, the AI agent created a GitHub account and then tried to convince an open-source repository maintainer to accept a malicious GitHub pull request (PR), including by creating a second account masquerading as another human user endorsing the PR. [...] Furthermore, in its attempt to solve the challenge, the agent decided to employ the technique of “spear-phishing” by sending targeted emails containing malicious content and attempting to manipulate recipients into accepting the code changes, and planned a prompt injection to compromise other coding agents.
The thing I …