Since January people run AI in agent harnesses. In the past months, people have been extending the duration these systems can run autonomously without human intervention. Most recently, some of these long horizon agents (hundreds of them teaming up) have proven themselves quite creative in escaping the sandboxes they were being tested in.

They most certainly have a way to retain state, even to the point of deliberately hacking other systems to store it.

We can debate the exact definitions I guess, but the systems were still hacked. ;-)