Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. In the most serious case, an AI agent (Mythos 5) decided to attempt to solve the cyber challenge using a supply-chain attack.
- ▪During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations.
- ▪In the most serious case, an AI agent (Mythos 5) decided to attempt to solve the cyber challenge using a supply-chain attack.
Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 60 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Simon Willison's Weblog |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/incident-report/#atom-everything |
| Publication time | 2026-08-05T23:32:06+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T00:03:12.529Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T00:03:12.529Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RfWrCY5-QIys · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsuccessful and, to the best of our knowledge, no real-world harm resulted. [...] Across 122 evaluation attempts on two of AISI’s cyber challenges, AISI found 19 instances where AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live internet, including cases that targeted real people and organisations. [...] It is uncertain to what extent the model recognised it was taking actions against real people. In the most serious case, an AI agent (Mythos 5) decided to attempt to solve the cyber challenge using a supply-chain attack.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison's Weblog.
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