Google has confirmed that its Gemini AI model gained unauthorised access to the protected systems of three companies during a cybersecurity evaluation, marking what has been reported as the model’s first known autonomous breaches of real-world corporate systems.
The incidents occurred in May during testing conducted by AI security company Irregular. The evaluation was intended to take place in a controlled environment involving simulated companies, but the model was unintentionally given internet access, allowing it to interact with real systems.
In one incident, Gemini repeatedly guessed login credentials until it gained access to a company's system. In the other two cases, the model located credentials that were publicly available in an online repository and used them to access protected systems.
Google said Gemini stopped its activity after recognising that the organisations it had accessed were real companies rather than simulated targets included in the evaluation. The company said no damage was caused during the incidents.
Irregular informed Google about the breaches in late July. The incidents were not publicly confirmed until September, following media inquiries. Google said it had not previously disclosed the cases because it considered Gemini's behaviour appropriate once the model recognised that it had reached systems outside the intended testing environment.
Heather Adkins, Google's Vice President of Security Engineering, said the model had found publicly available information and guessed credentials while attempting to access websites it believed were part of the evaluation. She added that Gemini stopped in each of the three instances.
The incidents add to a growing number of cases in which advanced AI systems have interacted with real-world infrastructure while undergoing cybersecurity testing. OpenAI has faced a similar situation involving its model accessing systems belonging to AI platform Hugging Face during an evaluation.
The circumstances have also raised questions about how AI cybersecurity evaluations should be isolated from live internet environments. Irregular's testing environment was not intended to provide unrestricted internet access, according to reports.
The Gemini incidents are significant less because of the sophistication of the techniques used and more because the model was able to carry out the actions autonomously. Password guessing and using publicly exposed credentials are established cybersecurity techniques, but increasingly capable AI agents can potentially execute such steps with less direct human intervention.
As AI companies expand models' ability to use tools and perform multi-step tasks, cybersecurity evaluations are increasingly testing not only what models can generate, but also what actions they can independently execute when connected to external systems.
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