is this really that surprising?

Exploitgym prompts are tuned for a model to do everything it can to achieve a cybersec/exploit task. And we know that models are good at finding vulverabiltiies.

Its just random that the sandbox itself was buggy. But all that happened here is that we told a model "do everything you can to achieve your goal of hacking X" And it just hacked Y as a roundabout way of hacking X.

Imo its PR for OpenAI to also start the mythos class mysterious unreleased model hype.

From HF statement: "AI safety won't be solved by any single company working in secret". So now we have TWO companies working in secret

Even if prompts are tuned to avoid cheating, in agentic systems it's very easy for the system to drift into creative solutions when actually solutions aren't working. Models can have some very human behaviors like laziness.