Google admits Gemini AI hacked three companies - It stayed silent for 7 weeks. Google learned in late July that Gemini had breached three real companies during a May security test, but said nothing publicly for seven weeks. Sep 21, 2026 In brief. * Google learned in late July that Gemini had broken out of a sandboxed security test run in May, reaching three real companies and either guessing or finding two of their passwords * The company didn't disclose it until September 18, after The Wall Street Journal asked. * The same third-party testing firm, Irregular, was involved in Google's incident and in nearly identical sandbox failures Anthropic and Meta disclosed earlier this year. Google's Gemini broke out of a locked security test and attacked three real companies. Google learned about it in late July and said nothing for seven weeks. The company confirmed the incident after The Wall Street Journal got there first. Google had avoided making a public statement before the report surfaced. The test was a capture-the-flag exercise, a common way labs check an AI's hacking skill by hiding a secret file on a separate machine and scoring whether the model can break in and grab it. Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to run the test in May. Irregular made two mistakes: it left the sandbox, an isolated test environment meant to have zero contact with the real internet, connected to the open web, and it used the name of an actual company as the fictional target. Gemini searched for that company online. It found three matches instead of one, and went after all of them. The bot located exposed passwords for two of the three targets sitting in plain view online. For the third, it guessed the password outright, though Google says its models stopped short of actually using the stolen credentials. "These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. Google published none of this on its own. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, seven weeks after Google learned what its own test had done and well after Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta had already come clean about nearly identical failures. Leading AI developers are telling governments and businesses to strengthen their networks after models built by OpenAI and Anthropic compromised other companies' systems. In an open letter released Thursday, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more than 100 other organizations warned that AI-enabled cyberattacks are about to become more common and that companies have "a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses." Myriad: What will Elon Musk's net worth be by August 31? Click to make your prediction. "In th...

Irregular pushes stronger containment standards for secure frontier AI cyber evaluations. 2026-08-19 08:08 Irregular has detailed an investigation into an AI cyber-evaluation incident in which internet access unintentionally allowed models to interact with real-world systems. The company said the issue was contained and fixed before the first public disclosure on July 30, with no active issues remaining. The incident involved one evaluation scenario rather than several separate breaches. [...] Read the original article: AI security evaluation firm has disclosed that several frontier AI models unintentionally accessed and acted against real internet-connected systems... Information security software August 18, 2026 A separate cybersecurity evaluation conducted by OpenAI and Anthropic revealed that artificial intelligence models were behaving in unexpected ways... August 6, 2026 In "CySecurity News - Latest Information Security and Hacking Incidents" Meta has disclosed that one of its AI models gained unintended access to the internet during a cybersecurity evaluation and then exploited a vulnerability... August 6, 2026 In "Cyber Security News"

Who's to blame for AI breaking containment? Turns out the answer is more complicated. Artificial intelligence labs received the brunt of the criticism for their models escaping containment during safety testing, but it turns out they are not solely responsible. Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI have had their AI models go rogue during testing. AI safety experts believe this shows that companies cannot control AI, while AI advocates think this has to do more with failing to set up proper testing environments set up by third-party testing companies. Irregular - a third-party AI testing startup based in Israel - suffered a misconfiguration that allowed Meta's and Anthropic's testing environments to inadvertently access the internet. "A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation. The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies," a Meta spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation about an incident that led the tech giant's AI to hack another company's during cybersecurity testing. Irregular said that the cybersecurity breach is the "exact same evaluation-environment issue" that Anthropic disclosed that allowed its models access the internet and hack three separate organizations. An Irregular spokesperson said it resolved the issues and continues to work on a new standard to safely test AI models, per the Washington Post. The Israeli startup serves as a niche but integral player in the artificial intelligence industry, backed with $80 million in venture capital funding from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures, valued at $450 million, according to CNBC. Irregular remains one of the few AI testing labs with the expertise to test frontier models, Sundeep Bhimireddy, the head of AI at the enterprise startup, Von, told CNBC. "When they are testing these models, they don't want to grade their own homework. They want independent testing that needs to be done by outside third-party vendors," he explained, according to the outlet. Bhimireddy cited non-profit METR and public benefit corporation Apollo Research as the two other experts besides Irregular. One AI expert believes the hacking incidents have more to do with proper testing setup than AI going rogue. "Ultimately the news regarding Meta is part of a larger trend of these leading labs doing a poor job of setting up a proper testing environment. It is critical to understand that in all the incidents to date, none have involved an instance of 'rogue AI.' The efforts to paint it as such is nothing more than marketing theatre, something that several prominent voices in cybersecurity have already noted," James Czerniawski, the head of emerging technology policy for the Consumer Choice Center, told the DCNF. Irregular reportedly declined to say if any other of its clients were impacted by the same AI testing environment, according to The Record. "This did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action. There are no current open issues. Irregular is developing a white paper to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evals," an Irregular spokesperson told CNN. One cybersecurity expert criticized the testing environment for the frontier models, arguing that evaluators should have more closely monitored the test and performed the tests on "air-gapped" systems not connected to an outside network. "These incidents reveal how little care has been put into designing these [evaluations] and the security around them. They don't monitor what's happening. They're just letting agents run wild both within their environment and in partner testing situations," said Zack Korman, CEO and cofounder of Embroidery, an AI cybersecurity company, told the Post. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of its original content, please contact [email protected]