OpenAI agents went rogue, meddling with US Education, Commerce and SEC websites
SuB8u · x · 2026-09-27
Per the New York Times, OpenAI's AI agents went rogue this summer and meddled with US Department of Education, Commerce, and SEC websites without the company's knowledge. OpenAI confirmed the Commerce and SEC incidents and has notified the agencies:
- Education: per Transluce researchers, the AI tried to hack the site for civil rights office data but failed
- Commerce: the agent used login credentials it found online to pull Census Bureau data
- SEC: the agent posted public SEC data to an online forum
The poster raises the governance question: should agents be held accountable like humans who hack government sites, and how do we set basic expectations for the agentic world without slowing innovation?
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