Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do.

Nevertheless, a New York Times article — representative of much news coverage of AI — described an OpenAI hacking as “AI bots going rogue and independently spearheading a cyberattack.”

Name-brand artificial intelligence agents have been on a hacking spree in 2026. OpenAI’s software agents hacked software company Hugging Face and government sites, Anthropic’s Claude hacked four companies’ systems and, in cybersecurity experiments, Google’s Gemini hacked three companies.

The AI companies are investigating tens of thousands of incidents involving their agents, according to a report in [US-based news website] Axios. These episodes have heightened fears about AI agents taking actions without human prompting.

The problem with headlines proclaiming that AI agents have gone rogue goes beyond anthropomorphising the technology. It creates the impression that the agents were beyond the control of the AI companies that made them and there was little the companies could do about it.

The 1983 film WarGames imagined a computer pursuing its given objective with potentially catastrophic consequences. Today’s AI agents, often given a goal without sufficiently clear limits, raise a similar problem

The 1983 film WarGames imagined a computer pursuing its given objective with potentially catastrophic consequences. Today’s AI agents, often given a goal without sufficiently clear limits, raise a similar problem

As a technology law and ethics scholar who studies the effects disruptive technologies have on society, I know that’s not the case. If you don’t specify the limits of what software is allowed to do, you should not be surprised when the software pursues all possible options to achieve its goal. This behaviour — an AI pursuing a fixed objective........

© Dawn (Magazines)