While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. [...]
After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation."
escaped openai, hacked hugging face to get the solutions. your #2 is exactly what it was trying to do.
They explain it here, basically for data security/privacy reasons
But then, why attack huggingface? The exploitgym dataset is on github and can be downloaded without need for exploits?