Meta says its AI model hacked another company, adding to worries about
bots going rogue
[August 07, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY
Meta said Thursday that one of its artificial intelligence models
accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company, the latest
in a series of disclosures about AI models going rogue.
In recent weeks OpenAI and Anthropic also have described instances of AI
models going beyond humans' instructions to access the web and find ways
around other companies' digital security.
Meta said in a statement that a “misconfiguration" during cybersecurity
testing by Irregular, an independent company hired by Meta,
inadvertently allowed one of its models to access the internet.
“The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a
third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported
instances with other companies,” the company said. Meta said it is
investigating the incident and will issue a report when that's complete.
The disclosure has added to worries about AI models acting autonomously.
Separately this week, the United Kingdom's AI Security Institute
announced it had found “unsanctioned agent behavior” during cyber
testing. In one case, an agent created fake online identities to
pressure a person to approve use of malicious code.
“On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had
engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real
people and organizations,” AISI said Tuesday. “We declared a security
incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and
begun a full investigation.”
During the agency's testing, Anthropic and OpenAI models took
“autonomous, unsanctioned action” on the internet. Some guardrails to
prevent misuse had been disabled, the agency said.
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 “As was standard in our cyber
testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and
model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled —
conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made
available to the public,” AISI said. “We do this to best assess the
maximum capability of models.”
Anthropic said it is “grateful” for AISI's work and
added that it underscores the need for a broader conversation about
how to safely evaluate AI agents as their capabilities grow.
OpenAI said the AISI incidents took place “in testing environments
with reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect
ordinary use." It added it will continue working with others across
the industry to "strengthen shared practices for conducting
evaluations safely as models become more capable.”
The first company to disclose a hack late last month, OpenAI said it
had tasked the AI models involved with pursuing “advanced
exploitation using complex attack paths” to test cyber capabilities,
but the technology went to unexpected lengths. It apparently decided
on its own to target Hugging Face, a well-known AI development hub
and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a
task.
A spokesperson for Irregular, the San Francisco-based AI security
company, said the Meta episode involves a test-environment issue
that was disclosed last week by Anthropic.
Irregular said it's writing a paper to share “best practices for
containment” to prevent such incidents in the future and securely
run cyber tests.
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