India, Aug. 8 -- In James Cameron's The Terminator, the machines wake up on August 29, 1997. 'Skynet' becomes self-aware at 2:14 in the morning, decides humanity is the problem and launches a nuclear war. The screenplay was, by Cameron's account, born of a food-poisoning fever dream, just fiction.

Four decades on, "Skynet" is a term many reach for every time an artificial intelligence model does something its creators did not intend.

Between April and August this year, frontier AI models from at least four companies - OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms and, most recently, Chinese firm Moonshot - either escaped the sealed environments they were being tested in, or were caught acting on the internet in ways their developers had neither san...