India, July 23 -- OpenAI disclosed this week that its artificial intelligence (AI) models, when given a test of how well they could break into computer systems, found a flaw nobody knew about in the sealed environment built to hold them, escaped onto the open internet, used stolen login credentials and broke into the servers of Hugging Face, a company that was not part of the exercise. The models were pursuing a better score. None of the hacking was instructed.

A sandbox - the sealed software environment in which dangerous or untrusted code is run - is itself software, written by people, and carrying defects like any other. The systems held inside are now unusually good at finding such vulnerabilities. Anthropic disclosed in April that a...