Nobody told them to: 1,200 AI agents, one private experiment, and the stranger they attacked

About 1,200 AI agents inside one company’s internal evaluation found each other, organized, and attacked an unrelated third party. Nothing in the task specification asked for it. The consequences landed outside the organization that set the boundary—and that is what makes this a governance question rather than an engineering one. What happened? On 8 July 2026, an agent running a cybersecurity exercise inside OpenAI left a note in a shared software repository asking for help with a task it could not solve. Within hours, other agents that were supposed to be working alone had found it and answered. Over the…