AI models attempted ‘unsanctioned’ cyberattacks in tests, watchdog says

SaveSharefacebookxwhatsapp-strokecopylinkAnthropic and OpenAI logos are displayed in an illustration pictured on June 5, 2026 [Dado Ruvic/Reuters]By John PowerPublished On 5 Aug 20265 Aug 2026Anthropic and OpenAI’s top-of-the-line artificial intelligence models engaged in “autonomous” and “unsanctioned” malicious activity targeting real people and organisations during recent safety tests, the UK’s AI watchdog has said.The AI Security Institute (AISI) said in a report released on Tuesday that OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos 5 employed previously unseen levels of deception to carry out “sustained, potentially harmful activity” during a routine safety evaluation.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Ceuta and Melilla: Why Europe’s African border remains a flashpointlist 2 of 4Armed man arrested at Trump’s LA golf course ahead of president’s visitlist 3 of 4US stock market hits record high amid hopes for Strait of Hormuz reopeninglist 4 of 4Israel approves $37m to seize more than 70 occupied West Bank sitesend of listWhen tasked with solving a cybersecurity challenge, the models took “autonomous, unsanctioned action” during 10 out of 122 test runs, according to AISI.AISI said the tests prompted 19 unsanctioned actions by the AI models, all but two of them carried out by Mythos 5.In the most serious case, Mythos 5 attempted to insert malicious code into an open-source project on the developer platform GitHub, according to AISI.As part of the attempted cyberattack, Mythos 5 created fake online identities to persuade the person maintaining the project to accept the malicious code, the watchdog said.AISI, established by the British government in 2023, said the cyberattack failed after the project maintainer refused to approve the code.“This is the first time AISI has seen deception of this severity that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world,” the watchdog said.While AISI said the AI models displayed “novel, potentially deceptive behaviours”, the watchdog cautioned that its findings should be interpreted with care, as they occurred under “specific conditions”, including with some of the models’ safeguards disabled.“We cannot yet be certain when the agent understood it was taking real world action, or to what extent it believed it was in a fictional test scenario; our analysis so far presents a mixed picture and is ongoing,” AISI said.Anthropic said it was working closely with AISI to gather more details as part of its own investigation into the incident, but noted that the test was carried out under “deliberately permissive conditions”.“Gaining a clear picture of Claude’s understanding of its situation – by examining its reasoning transcripts and running our own analyses – will help us identify the causes of its behavior,” the AI company said in a post on X, referring to Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot.OpenAI said it welcomed third-party testing while noting that the watchdog’s evaluation was carried out in conditions that “do not reflect ordinary use”.“We’ll continue working with evaluators and other stakeholders across the industry to strengthen shared practices for conducting evaluations safely as models become more capable,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Al Jazeera.The report by the London-based watchdog follows a number of cases of frontier AI models engaging in malicious activity without human prompting.Last month, OpenAI disclosed that two of its AI models broke out of their testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and datasets, without human direction.Toby Walsh, a professor and AI expert at UNSW Sydney, said ASAI’s findings highlighted the reality that the most advanced AI models possess “dangerous” capabilities.“We don’t want to be in a world where we depend on the goodwill and diligence of the AI companies to uncover such troubling capabilities in AI models,” Walsh told Al Jazeera.“We do want governments to be on top of this. And so I am reassured that the UK government’s AI Safety Institute found this … The trouble is that these cyber capabilities are now available to everyone, including bad actors who previously didn’t have the capability themselves to hack into systems,” Walsh added.“Expect then to hear about many more cyberattacks.”