Did AI really ‘go rogue’? Not exactly, but we have plenty to fear

July 30, 2026 — 3:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

It’s an ancient fear. It goes back thousands of years. You find it in the story of Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology. And in stories like that of Surtr in Norse mythology. What if our inventions and discoveries get the better of us?

Wind forward to today, and people are starting to fear artificial intelligence going rogue and getting the better of us. OpenAI, for example, just published a blog post describing how its latest and most capable AI agents went rogue and hacked into Hugging Face, one of the most popular websites for AI researchers to share resources.

In response, a bill has just been proposed in the US Congress to force AI developers to provide a “kill switch” to shut down any AI that goes AWOL.

Now, there’s plenty to worry about, but not what you or Congress might think. And it’s certainly not what much of the reporting would have you think. News articles have talked about an AI that went “rogue”, that “escaped” its confinement, and got “outside”. No AI in this case went rogue.

Scared by tech’s debt deluge, investors are questioning the AI boom

Stephen BartholomeuszSenior business columnist

Senior business columnist

Indeed, the whole problem was that the AI did exactly and only what it was asked to do. It was asked to solve a cyber challenge, which it did rather too diligently.

And no AI “escaped” and got “outside”. The reality was much more prosaic. The AI was put in a sandbox and given........

© The Sydney Morning Herald