There's nothing in the evidence to suggest they exhausted all of the other options first. We know that they did some work and eventually settled on escaping the sandbox. That's basically it. This tells us:

- Compute is getting faster and LLMs are being optimized, so time to escape will drop. That's likely greater than linear growth.

- Restrictions and sandboxes don't always work. If there's a route to the open internet we should assume an LLM will find and exploit it, and we should probably assume that this is always possible for any non-air-gapped system (and even then, you can escape that...)

- We don't know the goal mechanism, so a future LLM might reach for cheating first even if a current one doesn't. It might try to obfuscate what it's doing, and derive its own goals outside of the prompt, especially if it manages to find a state mechanism like a message board.

I'm not an AI-doomer but this should be giving us a reason to think about how to control a rogue AI better. There's a lot going on here that we don't properly understand. That is a worry.