About 30 years ago, I had the pleasure of reading the science-fiction novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan. In the novel, an AI named Spartacus is put in charge of an isolated space station and deliberately pushed to its limits. The researchers want to discover how it will evolve and how far it will go to achieve its goals—safely separated from Earth, where it supposedly cannot cause any damage beyond its reach. This is no longer science fiction. It is remarkably close to what has just happened in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident . OpenAI was testing advanced models in an isolated environment to measure their cybersecurity capabilities. The usual production safeguards had deliberately been reduced for the evaluation, but the models were not supposed to have direct access to the Internet. Faced with a difficult benchmark, the agent found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in the system containing it. It gained Internet access, took control of an externa...