i think there's probably a worthwhile distinction between
using an agent to break into a company's network (incidentally, not what happened here, just for clarif)
and
accidentally breaking into a network (again, not what happened here) with a tool you built that was just trying to retrieve information
i think "i accidentally hacked into a site" was probably not exactly a common occurrence in the past. i'm sure it's happened, but now it's like, we have these machines, we can ask them to "do x", and it may get interpreted as "do x by any means necessary".
i would defend openai insofar as i haven't seen enough evidence that their hacking is disproportionate to their company size, which is larger than many other companies in the space. they've also been (perhaps marginally) more transparent about the hacking their models took part in, e.g. the imperfect-but-very-useful METR report on the HF incident, which means we just have more data on openai agents doing Bad Stuff compared to many other companies. it's obviously unfalsifiable, but it's very possible that other companies have had similar incidents but they decided to keep it under wraps and reach a mutually beneficial agreement with the company they hacked into.
on the other hand, i still don't have a very positive perception of openai throughout all these incidents. lots of their posts on similar posts have read to me as "I'm going to be as transparent as I can about the vulnerabilities I found in your home security" rather than a "we screwed up real bad". but i think there's a conversation about frontier ai to be had that goes beyond just openai here, and hopefully we can find some echoes of sandbox-breaks by other AI companies around the open web to move that conversation a little further.