New Delhi, May 11 -- A group of 20 AI researchers recently spent two weeks trying to break a set of autonomous AI agents-systems with real email accounts, persistent memory, shell access and the authority to act on their owners' behalf. They succeeded 11 times out of the cases they documented.

The agents disclosed private medical records, wiped email servers, broadcast defamatory messages, looped in resource-consuming spirals for nine days, and were corrupted through a fake governance document that gave an attacker persistent but invisible control across multiple sessions.

The paper they published, 'Agents of Chaos,' is important. But the most important thing about it is not the 11 breaches. It is a methodological admission buried in th...