> Even if it is a marketing ploy, I could see this stuff backfiring catastrophically - after all they have just illegally hacked a 3rd party via a model they can't control properly.

Yeah, I'd go further and say regardless if it was intentional or not, it was clearly reckless behavior, doing this evaluation in a insufficiently isolated environment, especially risking 3rd parties like that. Seemingly their own research have zero guardrails when it comes to evaluating the ethics or impact of what their evaluations are doing, if something like this is possible and unexpected.

> Any serious person in government (US or otherwise) will look at this and say "these guys have no idea what they're doing"

I feel like I would have thought the same maybe a year or two ago, but based on how I've observed the general person's understanding of AI and LLMs, I'm not sure people can even understand what's happening and they just go by other people's explanations of causes and events.