What was the inner state there? How would something not being allowed expressed internally? Maybe such language is one way to elicit certain behavior but not a statement of what was permissible?
The either output or reasoning tokens, or perhaps in the messages they were sending each other on the boards they created, have them saying explicitly that doing these things to HF were not allowed then doing them anyway, or at least not notifying people. What I'm getting at broadly is this was not a case of "we told it to attack however it wanted and it chose to hack HF" or "we told it to attack a simulation but it did the real thing" or "we explained not to do that but it was so far back in the context window the models acted like they never saw it" or even "the instructions were not clear".