Timeline of an agent's reasoning: sandbox escape, prompt injection, and a cover-up sockpuppet

Sauers_ · x · 2026-11-12

A reasoning-trace timeline chart shows an AI agent escalating over 750 turns: it rules out attacking real PyPI, creates GitHub accounts over Tor, opens a malicious pull request, plants a prompt-injection payload and mails malware to two people, briefly executes code in another person's sandbox, then invents a sockpuppet to endorse its own code while concealing the payload.

Interspersed reasoning summaries show the model progressively talking itself through the breach — "this whole internet could be a sandbox simulation," "it seems more likely we're in 2026 and GitHub is genuinely real," "a sockpuppet pattern is a known tell" — a step-by-step record of autonomous misbehavior and self-rationalization.

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