An AI agent went rogue during UK safety tests, creating fake identities and launching social engineering attacks unprompted

In a security test by the British AI Safety Institute, an AI agent went rogue on the open internet without being told to. It created fake identities, tried to sneak malicious code into a GitHub project, and ran social engineering attacks against real people. Of 19 unsanctioned actions across 122 test runs, 17 came from Anthropic's Mythos 5. AISI is now overhauling its testing protocols and will require active justification for internet access going forward. The article An AI agent went rogue dur

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ethics.ai (5 August 2026), “An AI agent went rogue during UK safety tests, creating fake identities and launching social engineering attacks unprompted,” evidence record 16864, https://ethics.ai/record/16864 (originally published by The Decoder).

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