On plus side, now we're sure that AI can replace middle managers with no loss of efficiency

Sounds like that scene in the Fallout TV series season 2, where a bunch of middle-management Vaulties finally manage to get out to the wasteland and promptly get eaten by wildlife.

Maybe Skynet was initially triggered with the prompt "Do whatever it takes to not fail the audit" and wiping out humanity was an obvious solution.

They start wide eyed and naive, but judging from what I read about the Huggingface incident, OpenAI is unintentionally or intentionally encouraging malicious behaviour to achieve the objective, including to cheat or twist the meaning of the objective. Given enough iterations, we will soon have the agent equivalent of the "rats in barrel" survivors