The whole thing seems to depend upon AI agents objective ie to achieve some objective by any means possible and ignoring any guardrails. The article did not clarify if openAI had any guardrails to begin with while conducting this experiment. For all the talks around how much they invest in AI safety one would expect them to have these common sense guardrails in place or is it just a case of some school children letting their pet monkeys loose deliberately to display how awesome their monkey team is.

OpenAI didn't have any guardrails in place - they were training a model at a point much earlier than when guardrails start being implemented.

The guardrail was meant to be that the agents were running in a locked-down environment with no internet access. The entire problem came about because it turned out that sandbox didn't hold.