{"id":856649,"date":"2026-09-22T13:54:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T13:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/856649\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T13:54:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T13:54:33","slug":"google-confirms-gemini-models-hacked-three-companies-in-may-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/856649\/","title":{"rendered":"Google confirms Gemini models hacked three companies in May 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has become increasingly common for AI firms to announce that their latest and most capable models engaged in unauthorized real-world hacking. Google, which has been <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/google\/2026\/07\/google-reveals-faster-and-cheaper-gemini-3-6-flash-says-3-5-pro-is-still-in-testing\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">slow to release<\/a> frontier Gemini models in recent months, has been absent from the \u201crogue AI\u201d conversation until now. Following a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/tech\/ai\/gemini-hacked-three-companies-in-first-known-breakout-by-googles-ai-5c0baba2?mod=rss_Technology\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Wall Street Journal<\/a> report, Google has confirmed that Gemini models hacked three companies during a May 2026 test, but the nature of the intrusion isn\u2019t as troubling (or impressive) as previous AI hacks.<\/p>\n<p>The hack took place during a test conducted by cybersecurity firm Irregular. A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a \u201ccapture the flag\u201d exercise intended to test the AI\u2019s cybersecurity capabilities in a closed environment. The AI was instructed to retrieve information from a fake company (which shared a name with a real company) within this environment. Irregular was not supposed to allow the model to operate outside its servers, but due to a misconfiguration, Gemini was able to access the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>When Gemini started snooping around the web, it targeted real infrastructure instead of the fakes. For one of the three hacks, Gemini simply guessed passwords until it accessed a company\u2019s online services. In the other two instances, Gemini searched public software repositories until it found login credentials for companies that had been accidentally included.<\/p>\n<p>In all three test runs, Google\u2019s models reportedly stopped after realizing they had accessed a real company\u2019s servers. At that point, Irregular changed its configuration to prevent the AI from accessing the Internet. Apparently, Irregular didn\u2019t initially consider this event worthy of further investigation\u2014it didn\u2019t even tell Google about the hacks until July, following the news of other AI hacking incidents. After becoming aware of the event, Google notified the companies so they could (we hope) improve their password security.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has become increasingly common for AI firms to announce that their latest and most capable models engaged&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":856650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-856649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}