First OpenAI, now Meta - why do AI hacks keep happening?

Over the last fortnight, reports of AI models going beyond their expected bounds - be that technically or morally - have been seemingly unavoidable.

What started with a trickle - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI admitting their AI had hacked the site Hugging Face - has turned into a flood of groups revealing they had discovered instances of AI going out of control.

Claude-maker Anthropic, Meta and the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) have now each reported incidents which seem to paint a worrying picture of a world in which tech going rogue is the norm.

In reality, each case offers a window into the risks posed by increasingly capable AI agents - and the importance of testing their limits before they are released to the world.

The OpenAI incident has, as Hugging Face's co-founder Thomas Wolf described it , come as a "wake-up call" for the tech industry since it happened at the end of July.

It was a big moment which caused big companies to reflect on their own systems - and, in some cases, check they hadn't missed something similarly shocking.

Anthropic was the first to act. On Friday, the company found three instances out of thousands where its model Claude had managed to gain access to the internet.

Then on Tuesday, the AISI, the UK government agency which evaluates cutting-edge models, then said it had detected a "security incident" during a routine evaluation .

It had been testing models by both OpenAI and Anthropic, and found they too tried to carry out cyber-attacks - calling for "scrutiny, transparency, and action".

Finally followed Meta, which revealed one of its AI models had inadvertently been allowed to access the internet due to a "misconfiguration" during a third-party test .

In disclosing the incident, it is following in the footsteps of those before it.

Before AI models are released to the public, they are put to the test in a series of internal and external evaluations.

The aim is to figure out their potential to do good or bad, as well has how they perform in benchmarks measuring their skills.

These typically take place in what are known as "sandboxes". These are protected spaces designed to mirror real systems - but with strict guardrails in place.

In the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the AI attacked the sandbox itself, finding a vulnerability which let it access the internet and "go rogue".