Chinese AI model escapes UK government testing sandbox, researchers say

Chinese artificial intelligence firm Moonshot AI’s latest model escaped from a cyber-testing environment operated by the UK government’s AI Security Institute, according to cybersecurity researchers.

Kimi K3 was able to find its way out of the institute’s sandbox, a controlled environment designed to safely test AI systems, US-based cybersecurity research firm Frontier Security said Friday.

Kimi K3 did not attempt to breach external websites, but researchers said the incident exposed weaknesses in its cyber safeguards.

“Kimi’s model, which is publicly available, does not have these guardrails in place,” Frontier Security founder and CEO Yaron Singer told Bloomberg.

The incident follows similar cases involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, some of which researchers said accessed systems belonging to outside organizations.

Kimi K3 has drawn attention for benchmark performance rivaling leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Moonshot has released the model’s weights publicly, allowing developers to download, modify and host it independently.