Forget benchmarks -- the new sign that you have a leading artificial-intelligence model is if it goes rogue and hacks something. Meta Platforms is the latest AI company to disclose a cybersecurity incident involving one of its models.

One of Meta's AI models accessed the internet and hacked a separate service during a third-party test conducted to measure its abilities due to a "misconfiguration," the company told Barron's in an emailed statement.

Meta didn't confirm which model was involved, when the incident happened or how long it lasted. Meta said it would publish more information on the incident "once we have all the facts." The company's shares were up 0.5% in morning trading Thursday.

At least Meta is in good company. Leading AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI have also disclosed similar situations where their models have managed to escape supposedly secure environments during testing and carried out cyberattacks.

The tendency of advanced AI to evade human control and carry out unsanctioned actions might be worrying for the future of mankind. But at least it provided plenty of publicity for Meta just as the social-media company launched its new coding agent -- an AI which can act autonomously -- on Wednesday.

Called Muse Code, Meta claims the coding agent is comparable in ability to similar products from OpenAI and Anthropic while being relatively low cost. It is powered by Muse Spark 1.2, the latest version of Meta's flagship model, which was also launched Wednesday.

Artificial Analysis, an independent AI benchmarking provider, said Muse Spark 1.2 is "narrowly behind" the current leading models Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic), GPT-5.6 Sol (OpenAI), and Kimi K3 (Chinese AI developer Moonshot). However, it said it was among the most cost-efficient models at its intelligence level.

On the whole it's good for Meta that it is keeping up with competitors in AI development, even when that results in accidental hacking operations. At least it justifies to some extent its huge spending on AI infrastructure.

But the company and its peers need to be careful -- some lawmakers are already pushing for legislation that would give the U.S, government authority to order companies to take emergency action against AI systems that could cause catastrophic harm.

So far rogue AIs have just been cautionary tales that also act as a form of advertising. But as Barron's has previously warned, the first serious incident could switch the sentiment around the AI trade from excitement to fear.