Following a Wall Street Journal report, Google has confirmed that Gemini models hacked three companies during a May 2026 test, but the nature of the intrusion isn’t as troubling as previous AI hacks.
A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a “capture the flag” exercise intended to test the AI’s cybersecurity capabilities in a closed environment.
In the other two instances, Gemini searched public software repositories until it found login credentials for companies that had been accidentally included.
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It has become common for AI firms to announce that their latest and most capable models engaged in unauthorized real-world hacking. Google, which has been slow to release frontier Gemini models in recent months, has been absent from the “rogue AI” conversation until now. Following a Wall Street Journal report, Google has confirmed that Gemini models hacked three companies during a May 2026 test, but the nature of the intrusion isn’t as troubling as previous AI hacks.
The hack took place during a test conducted by cybersecurity firm Irregular. A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a “capture the flag” exercise intended to test the AI’s cybersecurity capabilities in a closed 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.
For one of the three hacks, Gemini guessed passwords until it accessed a company’s online services. In the other two instances, Gemini searched public software repositories until it found login credentials for companies that had been accidentally included.
Irregular didn’t at first consider this event worthy of further investigation—it didn’t even tell Google about the hacks until July, following the news of other AI hacking incidents.
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