Very few think they made it up. Many think they set up a situation by disabling guardrails that would inevitably end up creating a newsworthy outcome.
These models are trained on cyber intrusion, that's literally what ExploitGym benchmark measures. That part should not surprise anyone.
But what if, say, OAI noticed the problem right away but Sam Altman recognised it would be a great PR and decided it should continue with increased compute budget?
"...Sam Altman recognised it would be a great PR and decided it should continue with increased compute budget?"
If that's what happened, Sam should go to jail.
Hint: If the labs making these technologies are incentivized to create or allow attacks on other services, then that is actually also a big fucking problem.