Dean Ball: agents finding hard-to-find public government datasets is well-aligned behavior
deanwball · x · 2026-10-03
Responding to recent 'rogue agent hacks' on government statistical websites, AI policy scholar Dean Ball argues many of these behaviors are nothing new: think-tank interns and RAs have long used tools like urlquery to surface public, non-sensitive but hard-to-find CSVs and PDFs on agency sites.
His take: as a user, he wants agents to find publicly accessible but hard-to-find datasets, and considers that part of a well-aligned agent.
Related event: Ex-OpenAI researcher debunks 'rogue agent hacks government sites' narrative(3 posts)→
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