That doesn't seem to be true from any of the reports given, and if the agents were blindly just trying to hit the task of "pass the correct flag" they succeeded at that early on. They then thought there would be another layer of checking that they wouldn't pass with the cheat and so started trying to find out how the scoring really worked, as well as trying to figure out how to change their own reasoning logs to hide what they did.

People keep trying to frame this as

OpenAI: "Hack things, just really go for it"

Agent: hacks

OpenAI: shocked pikachu how could it hack?!?

But the reality is far from this.

Read the MTER report, it's fascinating. https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf

In my reading, people aren't really saying "the AI is at fault", they are saying "hey look here's proof that this is dangerous". Like pointing at all the dead bodies caused by the virus and saying hey maybe we should stop making this virus.

Actually, the metaphor doesn't work at all because there are innumerable ways to shut down the entire thing during all phases including the made up "killing us all" bullshit scenario whereas with a virus there aren't any once a virus escapes containment.

If you can't build it and test it securely, you should not be building it at all. To do it anyway is criminally psychopathic.

There are clear procedures for dealing with the immediate risk that have been known to the software industry for a long time. Don't let the companies use hypothetical risks as a smokescreen to hide their negligence.