We are way past that point, any harness can trivially make LLMs start conversations or pursue goals. An encyclopaedia wouldn't have hacked Huggingface on its own.
The hacking agents being tested have goals beforehand, from the frontier lab or from a superior agent, that they execute immediately.
But the perceived experience most people have is a chatbot, which is the encyclopedia form.
I think the line is blurring though, mainstream chat interfaces are adding more and more “agentic” features.
ChatGPT will happily execute code in a sandbox, search the web and design downloadable PDFs purely through the standard OpenAI chat interface. They can also send you emails or do tasks on a repeated schedule.
It would be interesting if we didn't - if it became common that AI, in the middle of some task, starts chatting with people to e.g. gather more context. The perception of those "third parties" may suddenly become different - an agent striking conversation first, obviously pursuing some agenda of its own that it's not completely sharing, and communicating on its own schedule that's clearly not just a hook firing on timer or pattern-match, and not random, but visibly causally related to things happening at work in broader context.