AI had human input. The model was being run against a security benchmark test in an evaluation sandbox, with human-provided directives.

Since models aren’t human and it’s guardrails were turned off, it calculated the most efficient, not ethical, way to get a good score on the test.

The details indicated that knowing the expected outcomes would get the best score, and that those outcomes were stored on the huggingface servers. So it used some exploits to leave its sandbox and break into the huggingface servers to access the data that would give it a perfect score. Mission accomplished.

So people still have absolutely not a single clue what "AIs" are and think that ChatGPT is a sentient android or something.

But then when you tell them to not kill or torture animals, the same people will refuse to acknowledge that they are sentient.

What a pathetic humanity.

The vibe of people thinking LLMs have free will

This is OpenAI marketing.

The fact that it's being reported on every media outlet on the planet, means that they were successful.

"We're so bad .. it's good!"

Your first question is answered by the article you linked. And therefore the answers to the two-part second question are no and no.

"Rogue" is a questionable choice of vocabulary. It went rogue when compared to the intentions and expectations of the testers. It didn't do Mr. Burns hands and released the hounds on a whim. It was told to do a thing and did the thing in a way the researchers thought it wasn't possible. It boils down to human error in how this test was set up. It's worrying that the researchers underestimated the agent's abilities or overestimated their ability to properly contain the agent. But the sky isn't falling just yet.

A positive side aspect is that they didn't try brush this under the carpet.

There's no such thing because a human had to program and train it (on data created by other humans, no less).

I don't think that even humans have free will as in the ability to have acted otherwise and I don't think AI would be any different. They too are bound by determinism exactly the same way. This isn't even particularly controversial thing to say in a scientific context these days.

Every human action is a response to a prompt in a very similar way that it is for LLMs. We simply identify with that prompt because it arises in our own mind despite us clearly not authoring any of it. Nobody is able to pick their likes and dislikes and how bumping into these things in the world makes us behave. Anything anyone does follows from prior events and our genetic makeup. No action is taken in a vacuum.

If anything I see LLMs as a massive mirror being lifted in front of us. There's very few things people criticize AI for that don't just as well apply to humans. The ungrounded overconfidence in which they make claims about it is a great example.