The coverage of this attack is so focused on this as an emergent behavior given what it conjures in the imagination, but it's the byproduct of millions of iterations of RL to improve AI agents' offensive capabilities. No one made OpenAI or Anthropic do that, the benchmarking arms race of their own creation now incentivizes them to keep doing it and evidently their AI Safety people can't or don't want to stop it.
[1] https://www.mpi-sp.org/108048/ExploitGym__Can_AI_Agents_Turn...