The same scenario played out at Meta and Anthropic, whose AI models also hacked into outside companies during testing in partnership with Irregular.

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“All relevant labs were notified in late July, and affected entities were contacted as part of the investigation. As previously stated, Irregular took immediate action, and all known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago,” a spokesperson for Irregular said.

“Safe development of powerful AI models is critical and we invest deeply in this area,” said Heath Adkins, Google’s vice-president for security engineering. “We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they’ve now made to their testing processes. These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly.”

Google didn’t disclose the hacks until reporters from the Wall Street Journal asked about them, the paper reported Friday. Google said Gemini used information found online and guessed credentials to access other companies’ services.

A Google spokesperson said it didn’t initially disclose the hacks because the model didn’t cause harm and it stopped each of its incursions when it realised it had broken into a real company.

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