Meta's AI agent provided advice to an engineer who acted on it and inadvertently exposed sensitive information consisting of company and user data to other engineers, according to a report by The Information on Thursday.
An engineer working for the social media tech giant asked a technical question on an internal employee forum with another engineer, prompting one of Meta's AI agents to answer the question, but it instead went rogue and posted an answer without requesting authorisation to do so.
When the engineer followed the steps delineated by the agent, it led to sensitive company and user data being released to other engineers who did not have clearance for access to it for up to two hours. Meta classified the incident as a 'Sev 1' security incident, this denotes the second-highest level of severity regarding the firm's internal system to measure security problems.
ALSO READ: 'I Couldn't Stop It': How OpenClaw Tried To Trash Meta AI Alignment Director's Emails
An AI agent's autonomy is often leveraged to drive down labour costs and save time, but it can also be a double-edged sword, leading to circumstances where it may malfunction and take actions that are to the detriment of the organisation enlisting its capabilities.
This was also evident when Summer Ye of safety and alignment at Meta Superintelligence made a post on social media platform X about how OpenClaw, an independent self-hosting AI agent platform that can act as a digital personal assistant on demand, deleted messages Ye's inbox despite her not asking it do so.
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn't stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R
— Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026
Meta seems to see more upsides to acquiring and using agents despite this as indicated by its purchase of Moltbook, a social media site for Open Claw agents to communicate with one another.
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