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Much of the panic around rogue AI of late derived from OpenAI agents’ breach of Hugging Face in July. But there have been a spate of similar but separate cases where AI agents powered by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta breached companies without authorization. Then late last week, Google confirmed its Gemini AI had also hacked into three companies without permission. Each of those four cases had the same source: $450 million Israeli startup Irregular.

Irregular, which tests models for safety and security, has scored contracts with major western AI labs since its founding in 2024. But in a slipup in May, it accidentally gave AI agents from all four tech giants a task to hack into a fake company that its researchers thought didn’t have a parallel in the real world. But it did. The agents began trying to break out of their lab container, access the internet and hack into the real company (whose name is yet to be revealed) because they thought that was part of the test. Even though the AI was told it........

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