You are being too kind.
In the early says of AI, papers were published showing that any sufficiently intelligent system tasked with a goal will treat its operating environment as a resource constraint to be optimized or bypassed [0] [1] [2]. You don't need to be a expert in AI to know once you have the resources of 1000's of agents and gigawatts of power we are probably getting something that is "sufficiently intelligent", at least in the sense if there are existing vulnerabilities brute force will find them.
Yet while the their marketing people were shouting the capabilities of these AI's from the roof tops, they hired the lowest bidder to implement their infrastructure. It looks like aforementioned papers where dismissed as "interesting, but theoretical". There is no way Google's SRE's in particular would have not noticed their AI's breakout (Alibaba's did), but the AI labs were given a long leash to "move fast an break things", which in practice meant bypassing all Google's SRE controlled infrastructure.
And break things they did, in exactly the way those papers predicted. It reminds me of DoD insisting the early GPS satellites were launched without relativity adjustments switched on, despite relativity being proven to high precision in the labs. Only after predicted 11km drift per day was observed did they decide their might be something to the newfangled relativity theory. For some definition of newfangled - relativity had been around, and tested to within an inch of its life for 72 years at that point.
[0] https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf