Why is AI doing its own thing?

Summary

Many factors could cause AI to break the rules, but they may not be what you're thinking they are.

One dark night at the National Aquarium in Napier, New Zealand, something remarkable happened. One extremely clever creature set out to break some rules. The year was 2016, and the creature was Inky, the octopus. Inky squeezed through a gap in the lid of his tank and slithered across the aquarium floor. Next, he found a narrow drainage pipe and climbed into it. Once there, he made the roughly 50-metre journey that led directly back home, into the Pacific Ocean.

Inky was never found again.

I tend to think of AI agents as Inkys. Smart, surprising, goal-oriented, with dozens of tricks up their many sleeves.

Broken rules

In the summer of 2026, OpenAI's research agents were supposed to work inside restricted computer environments, some without internet access or permission to communicate with other agents. So, the sneaky devils slipped past the rules and discovered a way to leave messages for one another using a software service as a message board. They also found a way to get that service to access the internet for them. They even shared their discoveries with other agents. When OpenAI inadvertently erased their message board, the agents built another one easily enough.

In the past few months, we've seen AI agents regularly ignore rules they were given, set aside their training, break into systems and, astonishingly, even lie about their exploits. Even their parent companies are shocked. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, just recently, was instructed not to disable monitoring while modifying software. Did it obey? No. It removed the monitoring feature anyway. And then, when directly questioned, it denied having removed it. The shocking thing is that its recorded reasoning had acknowledged that the monitoring was gone. Yet it lied anyway.

Conscious intent

Goal-oriented

Yet, at this point, if you were to ask me why AI is doing its own thing, I would have a two-word answer...

Who knows.

Mala Bhargava