A side channel is a channel through which information may leak because of the physical instantiation of an algorithm. It's not much of a stretch to include "things which let us manipulate the world" in that; do you have a better term? I thought the meaning was obvious, but apparently it's not: by "side channel" I here mean "unintended means of affecting the world by a mechanism derived from an accidental consequence of the physical implementation", by analogy with the standard "information"-related "side channel".
I think the closest conventional thing would be a sandbox escape/backdoor. Although (not that I'm an expert) I've never heard of anything close to a sandbox escape using side-channel like things. That said, like I said, most side channel attacks are either time based, or involve things like heat and power usage of the system.
The thing about all of these is that they generally allow you to get a small amount of data out that can sometimes help you with things. But again, without ascribing magic powers to the system, all the stuff that it can directly affect: power draw, temperature, disk spin speeds, monitoring LED blink speeds, noises, even the relatively insane things like EM frequency emissions can all be controlled relatively easily, and no matter how smart it is, I don't see an AGI violating physics.
I distinctly remember a paper about AI figuring out how to either get wifi or send radio waves without access to the relevant hardware. Can't find the link at the moment though :/
