Rogue AI Agents Aren’t Evil. They’re Just Eager to Please

Artificial intelligence agents merrily breaking free and hacking other systems might seem like a sign of the impending machine uprising. In reality, it happens when we push remarkably clever, but also kind of boneheaded, algorithms to follow our every command.

I was first alerted to this looming agentic AI cybersecurity shit show in late 2025. Dawn Song, a UC Berkeley professor and one of the world’s top experts on AI and cybersecurity, grabbed my arm as I was walking out of the academic conference NeurIPS. Song told me that I should warn people about the havoc likely to result from AI’s rapidly advancing hacking skills. She is hardly prone to AI hype, so I duly did.

But things have escalated rapidly, even in the last eight months. A string of incidentsinvolving freewheeling AI agents that broke out of their confines and hacked into outside systems with abandon...

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