It sounds like something from a horrifying science fiction story: an AI model goes rogue, takes actions that its creators believed they had specifically prevented it from doing, to complete a task in ways that they had not foreseen. But that was what OpenAI said had really happened, this week, when it revealed that an experimental version of ChatGPT had shown "unprecedented" behaviour and taken the autonomous decision to hack a rival AI company, Hugging Face. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that an autonomous AI agent – which was being tested in what it thought was a restricted environment – had managed to go rogue, connect itself to the internet and hack into Hugging Face. It called it "an unprecedented ​cyber incident, ⁠involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities" and said that it was working to understand why it had happened and how its safeguards had not stopped it from happening. The cyber attack "was different from ​anything ⁠we had handled before", Hugging Face said.