There are many more possibilities than that.

For example, OpenAI did not explicitly tell the model to hack HuggingFace, but "accidentally" left some context permitting (or not explicitly forbidding) certain tools and designing a poor sandbox to begin with. And what do you know, something happened.

The fact the Anthropic announced that their own model did basically the same thing within a couple of weeks does, to me, suggest their is a strong PR driver to all this.