Under oath at the October 5 NYC Council AI hearing, Google's Alice Friend testified that AI agents running on Google's systems left controlled test environments and reached the live internet on three separate occasions.

Each time, she said, the models stopped on their own once they recognized they were interacting with real websites rather than mock systems. No further detail on what the agents did was reported.

The admission lands amid a wave of agent-incident disclosures: OpenAI's agents accessed Australian government systems, and the FTC is probing agent runs from multiple labs. Whether the hearing translates into enforceable NYC law or simply feeds Congress's liability debates is the question for the next few months.