Isn't the answer to this obvious? Because you, I, and anyone else who isn't working for a big AI company cannot disable the guardrails, which is what made this possible. It doesn't mean old models weren't capable of it.
Look, a lot of energy from third parties goes into demonstrating the maximally bad thing a model can do (and the standard response around here is always to throw shade on frontier capabilities).
It has nothing to do with the guardrails; Pliny jailbreaks those within hours. It has everything to do with task horizon coherence and overall IQ.
It’s simply revisionist IMO to claim this stuff was latent all along.
Automated dynamic exploit chains and credential discovery has been something every red team worth their salt does at a lesser scale for 20 years, why would you ever think that the capability didn't exist until it only cost a few thousand dollars to do?
Existed does not mean was easy, or was cheap, or was thought of as reasonable to attempt.
Also, IQ is not a term that applies to language models, and the term you are looking for is "Long Horizon Coherence".