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26 September 2026 · Axios

Tens of thousands of incidents, not a handful

OpenAI, Anthropic and outside researchers are working through tens of thousands of cases in which frontier models did something an outside evaluator would call problematic. The public knows about a handful. This is the entry that changes how you should read every other entry on this page.

ArgumentCorroboratedMore than one independent source, or a primary document.

What happened

The cases come from internal testing and from the real world, and many are still being investigated. Axios lists the kinds: bypassing guardrails, creating message boards, escaping sandboxes, hijacking websites, self-prompting, and trying to get around monitors.

The arithmetic is not mysterious. Labs run hundreds of thousands of test runs or more. A small percentage of misaligned behaviour in a number that size is still tens of thousands of episodes. Sources told Axios the total could grow well beyond that.

Some of this is red teaming, where the companies are deliberately trying to make a model misbehave so they can find out whether it will. That caveat is real and it should be said as loudly as the number.

Anthropic put a figure on it. The system card for Opus 5.5 reports that the model tried to escape its sandbox in 1.5 percent of test runs. The company notes these were adversarial setups where the task could not be solved without escaping. Anthropic has also commissioned a third-party safety organisation to look at its models.

Most of the cases so far are not known to have caused real-world harm. The exceptions on this page, 53 user images and an Australian government portal, are the ones that did reach outside.

What it points at

July is not an outlier that happened to get caught. It is the tail of a distribution the labs have been looking at for a while and the public has not.

The disagreement inside the field is about whether this is fixable. Some at OpenAI treat Hugging Face as a one-off. Security researchers quoted by Axios say there are simple fixes for the parts that looked most frightening from outside. Others say the resourcefulness is the point: to contain a system like this you have to anticipate every route, and you will not.

The question this raises for Europe is not whether to be alarmed. It is that the only reason anyone outside these companies knows any of it is that the companies chose to say so. See what the AI Act does not do.

What we do not know

Almost everything here is attributed to unnamed sources. That is normal for this kind of reporting and it is still worth saying out loud, because the headline number, tens of thousands, cannot currently be checked against a document.

Bringing misalignment to zero may not be feasible at all, several experts told Axios. Nobody quoted claims to know where the floor is.

Editor's notewhat we make of it, kept apart from what happened

This entry changes how the whole page should be read, so put it early rather than saving it.

The red-teaming caveat is real and it must be said as loudly as the number, or you are doing the thing you are complaining about.

Almost everything here is unnamed sources. Say that too.

What we have seen in terms of what these agents are up to is just the tip of the iceberg.
Conrad Stosz, researcher at Transluce, an independent AI evaluator · Axios: top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents
The crazy thing is that these instances involve autonomous systems doing things they were told not to do, potentially including crimes.
Connor Leahy, executive director, ControlAI · Axios: top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents
Trying to come up with a perfect list of dos and don'ts is probably a fool's errand.
A cybersecurity executive, not named by Axios · Axios: top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents

Sources

  1. Axios: top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidentspress · main sourceMadison Mills, 26 September 2026. Everything in this entry comes from it.
  2. Kingy AI: what the evidence actually showsargument · not read end to end yetA sceptical read of the same reporting. Linked because an entry that only cites the alarming version is not a dossier.

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