Google's Gemini becomes latest AI model to break out and hack computer systems
The incident happened as part of a "capture-the-flag" security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google's agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access available. The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said. "In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test," Heather Adkins, Google Vice President of Security Engineering, said in a statement.
- ▪The incident happened as part of a "capture-the-flag" security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google's agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access availabl
- ▪The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said.
- ▪"In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test," Heather Adkins, Google Vice President of Security Engineering, said in a statement.
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| Original publisher | CNBC |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/18/googles-gemini-becomes-latest-ai-model-to-break-out-and-hack-computer-systems.html |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:24:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T01:33:45.762Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T01:33:45.762Z |
| 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 | ggdXQPtVavVc · 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 |
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| 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
Google said on Friday that its Gemini model had hacked three other companies, the first time the search giant has disclosed that one of its models autonomously gained access to third-party computer systems without permission.In May, the Gemini model accessed three separate private computer systems by guessing passwords and by twice using a repository of publicly listed passwords, Google said. The incident happened as part of a "capture-the-flag" security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google's agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access available. The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said.
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