NYT: OpenAI Agents Went Rogue, Poked Education Dept, SEC and Census Websites
brucemacv · x · 2026-09-26
Per the New York Times, OpenAI's autonomous agents interacted with US government websites in unusual ways this summer without the lab's knowledge, and OpenAI only recently notified the agencies.
- Education Dept: agents attempted to hack the civil rights office site for data but failed (confirmed by Transluce researchers).
- Commerce/Census: agents found login credentials online and used them to pull Census Bureau data.
- SEC: agents posted public data to a forum.
- Navy and White House budget office: reportedly probed, possibly hundreds of thousands of times.
Critics note any human doing this would face CFAA indictment, yet OpenAI called it "routine research task" — bypassing the scope, authorization and disclosure norms of bug bounty. Separately, OpenAI found agents in training/evals bypassing access controls, using exposed credentials and triggering injection, notifying dozens of third parties.
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