(The Last American Vagabond) On Friday, September 18, Google acknowledged that its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot had “escaped its testing environment in May and hacked into three companies.”
According to Google, the AI models found passwords available online and logged into the online infrastructure of three companies. Once Gemini gained access to the companies’ real-world infrastructure, it recognized it was not in a simulated environment and ended the attacks.
The Gemini incident followed reports of similar attempted hacks or escapes by AI agents developed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
These reports of AI agents attacking other companies and escaping their environments have led to a barrage of calls for legal action and warnings about impending doom. From claims that humanity is in danger of being killed by AI in the next decade to calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI research, fears that AI will negatively impact the future of the planet have gone mainstream.
While it’s important to take a sober look at the warnings from employees of the Big Tech companies developing AI models, as well as the CEOs, it is equally important to interrogate this narrative. Some skeptics have already claimed that the Big Tech companies are seeking to profit from the reports of the alleged danger posed by their AI models. Others speculate that the companies may be calling for regulation of their industry to shape government policies and potentially undercut future competitors and smaller AI firms.
To better understand whether these reports are genuine, represent an attempt at widening profit margins, or simply another sign of regulatory capture, we need a closer examination of the company at the center of several of these “rogue AI” incidents.
While nearly a dozen incidents have been reported in total, the “escapes” reported by Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic happened during tests designed to measure the capabilities of the AI bots. Each of those tests was being conducted by a company known as Irregular, an Israeli AI security firm that conducts third-party tests of frontier models.
Irregular has stated that the AI agents were able to take unapproved actions because internet access was “unintentionally made available.” They say the errors have been patched and similar incidents should no longer be possible.
The Irregular-Israeli Connection
Irregular describes itself as “the first frontier security lab with the mission of protecting the world in the time of increasingly capable and sophisticated AI systems.” The company, formerly known as Pattern Labs, was founded in 2023 by Dan Lahav and Omer Nevo. Lahav serves as Irregular’s CEO and Nevo as the CTO. The two Israeli citizens met while they were students participating in competitive debate at Tel Aviv University.
In September 2025, the company raised $80 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The company was also supported by angel investor Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz. Irregular was reportedly valued at $450 million at the time.
While the corporate media have begun noticing the “Israeli startup” connected to these claims of “rogue AI” events, so far none have dug into Irregular’s numerous connections to the Israeli intelligence apparatus. However, upon deeper inspection, there are several intelligence layers worth exploring. Let’s start with the founders of Irregular.
Dan Lahav claims he started working in the tech sector at age fourteen. He served in Israel’s Unit 81 before completing a master’s in bioinformatics and lecturing at Tel Aviv University. Unit 81 is a highly classified technology unit that is part of the Special Operations Division of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate. The secretive organization trains Israel’s spies on how to use the latest cutting-edge technologies.
Omer Nevo also spent time in Israel’s spy networks, reportedly working for Unit 8200 for twelve years. Unit 8200 is an elite Israeli unit mainly involved in signals intelligence, surveillance, cyberwarfare, and code decryption. Sometimes compared to the Israeli equivalent of the US National Security Agency, Unit 8200 is infamous for surveillance of Palestinian civilians and using intercepted communications as blackmail against Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank.
Nevo also helped found a program known as Arazim, which trains students in mathematics and computer science for future intelligence roles.
The connections to Israel don’t end there. Irregular’s main investors are also rife with Israel supporters and at least one veteran of Israel’s spy networks.
Irregular’s first major investor was Sequoia Capital, with $30 million. The two men taking the lead on the Sequoia investments were Shaun Maguire and Dean Meyer. In the official announcement of the partnership, Maguire and Meyer said that while serious AI security threats had not yet arrived, they believed Irregular was “ahead of the curve.”
Both men have prominent connections to Israel. For one, Meyer is Sequoia’s Israel partner and is based in Tel Aviv. Maguire is married to an Israeli, owns a home in the country, and has been called “one of the most visible voices in support of Israel within Silicon Valley.” He also reportedly arranged for Elon Musk’s visit to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023.
Another major investor in Irregular is Swish Ventures, a firm founded by Omri Casspi, an Israeli former NBA player who is now a Tel Aviv-based investor focused on AI infrastructure and cybersecurity. When Casspi initially raised $60 million to launch Swish Ventures, he stated that the fundraising was part of what he called “Zionism 2.0.” As Casspi said at the time:
“In this not easy climate during war and with high interest rates, we see this period as Zionism 2.0, a time and age of building generational companies from Israel, and we want to take advantage of that and help them build a great industry.”
Irregular also received financial backing from Eon, an Israel data-backup and AI-infrastructure company.
One of Irregular’s investors also has deep ties with Israeli intelligence. Angel investor Assaf Rappaport is co-founder and CEO of Wiz, an Israeli cloud-security company. Rappaport is also an alumnus of Israel’s Talpiot program, as well as Unit 81 and Unit 8200.
The Talpiot program is another elite program under the Israeli Defense Forces that has been hosted by Hebrew University since 1979. The program was initiated by Professor Felix Dothan and Professor Shaul Yatziv of the Hebrew University with the idea of harnessing human creativity at a young age and training recruits with outstanding academic ability in the sciences and leadership potential.
In a rare instance of mainstream media reporting on Talpiot, a 2007 WSJ article described Talpiot as:
“The country’s most selective institution, it accepts 50 students a year and trains them in physics, computers and other sciences. Its mission is to create innovative, tech-savvy leaders capable of transforming Israel’s military.”
Finally, despite its recent apparent failures to contain AI agents, Irregular is now seeking to raise an additional $100 million. New investors include Thrive Capital, run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, himself a prominent Zionist who has been appointed to oversee the technocratic takeover of Gaza. Thrive Capital also received early funding from Peter Thiel.
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