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No, but it is the complement of a very complex thing. The algorithmic complexity of "the set of possible dice rolls that aren't 6,3,1,2,2..." only differs from "the dice roll 6,3,1,2,2" by a tiny constant (and is greater in most settings), but what we want here is probability theory, and "more complex things are less probable" is a heuristic that fails badly in cases like this. "The agent doesn't do just what we'd intended it to" is not meaningfully less simple than "The agent does do just what we'd intended it to", and is far, far more probable.
Or it requires basic observation. LLMs do very complicated things now. They can solve famous math problems that have been open for generations. Merely finding 0-day vulnerabilities is something they can do by the hundreds.
Again this is not under contention, what is under contention is whether they do it without any prompting, or being asked to do it. Show me the evidence that an LLM-Agent solves famous math problems when asked to compute 2 + 2...
The simple answer is that there are 10s and 100s of billions of dollars riding on stuff like this, which means bending the truth is a highly motivated behavior. Simply human greed + human lying. You trying to prove this algorithmic complexity vis a vis agent intent vs not intent is overly complicated, not Occam's razor in the slightest. I wished I lived in your world of rainbows, unicorn farts, and pixie dust, but I am a scientist, being a scientist requires skepticism, companies are greedy and they stretch the truth. Unless OpenAI wants to provide evidence of the prompts -> behavior that led to the model's black hat behavior, I am unconvinced this is anything more than a marketing stunt. shrug
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