I've read the relevant portions of OpenAI's report before, they're extremely light on details about how the agent managed to escape from the container sandbox into the VM which I can only assume is a result of fairly mundane misconfiguration.

Assuming that this wasn't meant to be the main boundary (and it shouldn't be), that would still be ok if they didn't punch a large Artifactory-shaped hole in the perimeter of their sandbox.

At that point it really is game over and it doesn't matter what kind of fancy sandboxing technology you're using because the isolation is only going to be as strong as the weakest link, which in this case is Artifactory, which is decidedly not designed to isolate malicious programs from the outside world.

> Or, interesting case: an action itself that is formally legitimate, but has nefarious side effects

That's true.

> they just persuade a group of people to do it.

That's possible but that threat isn't really unique in any way. We already have, what, tens of thousands of individuals with enough to wealth to corrupt democratic governance anywhere in the world?

Any sufficiently advanced AI should be smart enough to understand that you're only guaranteed to gain lasting power and influence by dressing up your bribes as campaign contributions, donations or local equivalents. Trying to go in guns blazing will very likely destabilize the entire world and result in the cord being pulled on all of AI.

That's a critique of capitalism, absurd concentration of wealth and what that wealth allows you to achieve more than anything else.