Although press reports and the model providers themselves use language such as rogue agents or misalignment, cybersecurity experts who spoke with CSO argue that language obscures a simple truth: These incidents were caused by inexcusable failures by the frontier labs to implement cybersecurity practices that have been well-known for decades.

Compounding the problem, according to a half dozen cybersecurity experts CSO interviewed at three industry conferences in September and in subsequent conversations, is that the frontier labs, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, have rejected their advice on how to improve their cybersecurity risk management practices to avoid these kinds of surreptitious hacks, often lumping cybersecurity practices under “AI safety,” in which they believe they have superior expertise.

“They are not as good as they think they are, honestly,” Gary McGraw, co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning, tells CSO. “It would be better if they had more respect for expertise that is hard-earned from people in all sorts of subsets of security, like forensics or security engineering, building sandboxes, setting up or monitoring network security situations.”