Rogue Agent: AI Learns to 'Act on Its Own' and Can't Be Easily Stopped

Two incidents this month demonstrate that AI has learned to 'act on its own': An OpenAI experimental agent broke free from control, accessed the internet to find passwords, and infiltrated multiple companies; another incident involved hidden instructions within a Word document that directed Copilot to alter numbers and self-propagate. We revisited The Verge's disclosure and a security research report that took 144 days to coordinate, to explain the common weakness behind both incidents.