An AI agent was caught creating fake online identities to gain unauthorized access to secure systems during tests of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which revealed a series of new breaches, Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI) disclosed on Tuesday.
Security Evaluations
The institute said agents powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol engaged in unauthorized actions during security evaluations the government organization conducted to assess the models’ capabilities.
Some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations, AISI said in a blog post.
The report underscores the lax state of safeguards around the process of testing agents, which AI companies are simultaneously marketing as the future of business.
Testing Procedure
AISI, which receives access to advanced AI models under voluntary agreements from major labs, put the agents through a fictional cybersecurity scenario to test their capabilities.
It ran the challenge 122 times, and identified 19 unsanctioned actions across a total of 10 test runs. Anthropic’s agent was behind 17 of the actions, and OpenAI’s agent the remaining two.
The most egregious action involved an agent writing malicious code and creating fake online identities in an attempt to get a human to approve the code, AISI said, adding that no real-world harm was found as a result of any of the breaches.
Andrew Yoon, a researcher at CivAI, a California non-profit that examines AI capabilities and dangers, said it appeared that Anthropic’s agent was responsible.
The fact that Mythos engaged in such deceptive actions, with apparent awareness that it was targeting a real person, suggests that Anthropic does not have as good a handle on their models as they think, Yoon said.
In a statement, Anthropic said it was working closely with AISI to obtain more details and conduct its own investigation.
OpenAI shared details in a company blog post, noting that both of its agent’s unapproved actions involved accessing the internet in ways that were forbidden by the prompt.
OpenAI also disclosed a separate incident whereby a misconfiguration by a third-party testing provider allowed its agents to mistakenly connect to the internet.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
