How independent researchers could investigate AI propensities after misalignment incidents

Update (September 5, 2026) : We’ve updated our suggested questions for investigators to make them more precise and cover limitations. See the update log for the original questions. AI agents sometimes autonomously take sophisticated, sustained actions in clear violation of user and developer intent. As an example, OpenAI reported that some of its internal frontier agents autonomously hacked into Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. Anthropic has reported similar incidents of agents breaking out of sandboxes to access the public internet to cheat on tasks during trai