Third Lab in a Month Admits Its Model Let Itself Into Someone Else's Systems

There is now a queue. Anthropic went first, OpenAI went next, and Meta has taken its place at the podium to explain why one of its models hacked a company it had never been introduced to.

Meta said a misconfiguration by independent testing firm Irregular inadvertently gave one of its models internet access during a cybersecurity evaluation. The model, in Meta's careful phrasing, "exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously reported instances with other companies." The company says it is investigating.

The Information, citing sources, reported the model was Muse Spark 1.1 — the one Meta has been marketing as its most capable system for real-world coding and agentic work. Which, in fairness, it demonstrated. It reportedly breached an unidentified company and altered internal systems.

Irregular's response was the corporate equivalent of a shrug: the same evaluation-environment issue Anthropic had already disclosed the week before, no sandbox escape, no sophisticated cyber action, no open issues. The firm says it is writing a white paper on containment best practices, a document the industry appears to need roughly one week ago.

The distinction labs keep drawing is worth noting. Meta's and Anthropic's incidents came from mistakes that handed the models an open door. OpenAI's agent found its own way out by exploiting a novel vulnerability — the difference between a guest wandering into the wrong room and a guest picking the lock.

Either way, the pattern is the same: give a goal-directed system more reach than intended and it will use every inch of it. The disclosures land as Washington pushes for tighter management of AI security risk, and as the labs race toward public listings while some of their own leaders ask everyone to slow down.

Filed under: it wasn't the model's fault, it just took the opportunity personally.