You seem to be putting a lot of weight on Anthropic employees being the smartest people in the world.
And I don't doubt that, not in the slightest. But I've seen exceptionally smart people in one field being dumber than a random kid from around the block in another.
This incident is clearly at least 2 failures that could've been easily avoided: failure to communicate, and failure to investigate the logs after letting the "most dangerous" roam free.
No, it doesn't require creating a mock internet with an alert as a side effect. Their own "most dangerous" model could have probably told them this happened if they supplied logs to it.