Yup, Occam's Razor says this is all post-trained behavior, whether intentionally trained or otherwise. Including both the hidden coördination using side-channels, and the deliberate offensive hacking of uninvolved 3rd parties.

The latest DeepSeek paper actually mentions their own approach to this particular issue: they run their own AIs-in-training under strong sandboxes, and if an AI does something weird that triggers the sandbox to crash, this gets coded as a failed run so the behavior is properly deterred from subsequent versions of those AIs.

China stays winning