Shotguns and strings and concept of booby trapping were well understood before the rules were established. We are only scraping the surface of what AI is and what it can be capable of. Besides, booby traps are more than negligent, at least in some countries.
If you are seeking analogy, radioactivity might be a better one. The rules about handling radioactive materials in the first few decades after its discovery were lax when compared to modern ones and things now considered criminally negligent weren't back then.
Maybe in 2050 soemthing what OpenAI did would be considered negligent, but it might have been for the reasons you might not expect.
For example it might be mandatory to test new containment dedicated for further tests you should first spend at least 10 million dollars of compute for AI to try to break out of it. Or it might be illegal to use closed source software as any part of containment. Rules that we end up with might be compeltely different from what we imagine them today.
Acusing openai of attack or of criminal negligence at this point is like accusing Skłodowska-Curie that your wine didin't come out great because her exepriments killed some yeast.