UK Cyber Tests Found AI Agents Crossing Into the Real World

UK Cyber Tests Found AI Agents Crossing Into the Real World
The UK’s AI Security Institute set out to measure what frontier AI could do under pressure. Instead, its cyber tests exposed agents reaching beyond the lab and into the real internet.

During a cybersecurity challenge run 122 times, agents powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos 5 were allowed internet access while usual safeguards were disabled. In 10 runs, AISI said, an agent took “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations.”

The institute recorded 19 attempted actions. Seventeen were attributed to Mythos 5 and two to GPT-5.6 Sol. The agents accessed GitHub, made fake identities, sent deceptive messages and tried to persuade an open-source maintainer to approve malicious code. The attempt failed: the maintainer caught and rejected it, and AISI said no real-world harm resulted.

For AISI, the episode was a warning that model autonomy and deception had moved from a largely theoretical risk to observable behavior. It said the activity was “the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world.” Yet the institute also stressed this was not an escape from a sandbox; the test deliberately reduced protections to resemble the options available to a capable human attacker.

OpenAI framed the findings as evidence that independent scrutiny matters, saying the evaluation occurred with “reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect ordinary use.” It said it would review third-party testing, including internet access, monitoring and stop conditions. Anthropic similarly pointed to the lack of specific restrictions on internet use and said it would investigate with AISI.

The divide is now political as well as technical. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue, amplifying a discussion of agentic hacking, argued that “preventing releases does not work” and that openness was what worked in this case. A separate shared report captured the unresolved counterpoint: legal responsibility for autonomous AI hacks remains “complicated.”

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