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 “A.I. 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 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 anthropomorphizing 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.

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 behavior – an AI pursuing a fixed objective – is what I call the “War Games” problem, and it’s been recognized in the field of computer science for decades.

Been there, seen that

In the 1983 movie “War Games,” a teenager, David, hacks into a computer to play a new video game, Global Thermonuclear War. David doesn’t know that the computer is the government’s AI machine tasked with defending the United States from Russian........

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