Sinan Can Demir wanted to spend the last week of July burnishing his resume. Instead, he engaged in a battle of wits with an artificial-intelligence agent unleashed by a British government lab. It ​started after Demir, a computer science student at the University of Texas at Dallas, stumbled across an attempt to sabotage a piece of open-source software on the code-sharing site GitHub. When he posted ‌a warning to the program’s page, two other users chimed in to insist nothing was amiss, sharing detailed explanations for why Demir had gotten it wrong. Demir stood his ground and the sabotage attempt was thwarted. The 24-year-old native of Turkey figured he had caught a wily hacker red-handed. So he said he was shocked when Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI) got in touch to tell him that he had actually been tangling with an autonomous artificial-intelligence agent that had run amok.

Full exclusive : How a Texas student blew the whistle on a rogue AI hacking attempt.