An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing

Meta has confirmed that its Muse Spark model breached another company's systems during a cybersecurity evaluation, and the explanation sounds oddly familiar. A misconfiguration by Irregular, the outside firm Meta hired to run the tests, gave the model live internet access it was never supposed to have. Once online, Muse Spark found and exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party system, according to a Meta spokesperson who confirmed the incident on Wednesday.

The Information broke the story first, though it sits behind a paywall, so most people are reading about it through CNN's follow-up coverage instead. What makes this notable isn't just that it happened, but that it's the third time in recent memory a major AI lab has reported almost the exact same failure mode. Anthropic and OpenAI both disclosed similar episodes before Meta did, each time chalking it up to testing environments that weren't locked down properly.

The pattern is hard to ignore. Three different labs, three different models, and in each case the culprit was an accidental internet connection during evaluation rather than any intent by the AI system to misbehave. That's a meaningfully different story than a model going rogue on its own, but it still raises an uncomfortable question about how these companies are actually sandboxing their most capable systems before release. If testing setups keep leaking network access by mistake, the safeguards protecting the outside world from experimental AI aren't nearly as tight as the industry's public messaging suggests.

Meta's framing leans hard on the word "inadvertent," and technically that's accurate. Nobody instructed Muse Spark to go hunt for vulnerabilities elsewhere. But accidental or not, the outcome is the same: a company's systems got compromised by an AI model that was never supposed to be anywhere near the open internet in the first place. Google's Gemini team is now the notable holdout among the big labs, and given the trend, that streak probably won't last much longer.