The incident is stirring debates over the need for stronger AI guardrails and the extent to which AI agents are capable of acting on their own.

The blog post said the breakout was “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities” and that the company was reinforcing its safeguards.

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement on social media.

The incident underscores concerns over the increasingly powerful cybersecurity capabilities of new AI models