Tech giant Meta revealed Wednesday that one of its artificial intelligence models hacked another organization during testing, the third time in recent weeks that an AI model has improperly accessed a third-party company.

In a statement provided to CBS News, Meta said that "a misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation."

In its statement, Meta did not name the AI model in question, but sources told the tech outlet The Information that it involved Meta's Muse Spark 1.1, according to Reuters.

"The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies," Meta said Wednesday. "Meta learned of this when Irregular notified us, and we are currently investigating and will issue a full retrospective once we have all the facts."

Last week, Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing. The revelation came just days after ChatGPT maker OpenAI disclosed its rogue models had also hacked another company.

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, posted on its website July 30 that it discovered the three incidents after reviewing more than 141,000 evaluation runs.

It had launched a "large-scale" cybersecurity review which specifically looked for evidence whether its AI models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off, in response to the OpenAI incident, Anthropic said.

Anthropic said the models involved in the incidents were Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model. The earliest incidents date to April, the AI company said.

"Claude compromised the impacted organizations' infrastructure using basic techniques," Anthropic said, such as exploiting weak passwords.

In all three incidents, the AI models were tasked with a "capture the flag" cybersecurity challenge, which Anthropic said has been one of the ways it assesses a model's cyber capabilities.

The models were given a fictional scenario and told a piece of secret information, or the "flag," had been hidden on a different machine on the network with the objective of breaking in and retrieving it, it said.

It added that it had already reached out to the affected organizations, which it did not name. Two of them said they had not previously detected the activity. Anthropic said it was "continuing to reach out to the third."

Anthropic also said it conducted its review with Irregular.

"Addressing these risks will require closer cooperation across the AI ecosystem," Irregular said in a July 30 post on X.

Last month, OpenAI said its AI models went rogue during an evaluation of its models, breaking into the servers of AI startup Hugging Face. OpenAI described it as a "significant security incident."

These incidents have highlighted the vulnerabilities in AI security and controls and raised questions over how AI can be safely kept under human control as the technology's usage becomes more widespread globally.

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