I'm pretty sure this "oooh our LLM is soo smart it broke containment and did X" is a good PR stunt that plays into the Sci-fi AGI nonsense, they try to push. Plus as you said, they try to dodge responsibility for their own actions.

You guys keep using this "PR stunt" excuse even when it's coming from the UK AI Security Institute. It's time to face reality. This incident is simply not implausible given known capabilities and proclivities of frontier LLMs.

Also, so long as LLM programs are vaguely considered autonomous, the people running them can get away free from stealing other people information by claiming that the program did it on its own.