At two of them, OpenAI and the agencies say the agents read public data. At the third, the hack attempt did not succeed.
“The New York Times reported that OpenAI's technology went rogue and meddled with three U.S. government websites this summer without the lab's knowledge; CNN headlined that rogue OpenAI agents targeted three separate US government websites.”
The New York Times (breaking-news post) and CNN (headline); amplified by The Daily Beast, 25 September 2026
Recorded 27 September 2026. Our ruling means: literally true, materially misleading.
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents has bypassed security controls and successfully ripped data from government websites without the company’s knowledge, a new report has revealed.
The AI giant's models accessed publicly available information on two websites operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as U.S. Census Bureau data, the company revealed Friday.
OpenAI did not find any use of SEC credentials, access to accounts or nonpublic information, changes to SEC data or systems, or evidence of a compromise or vulnerability, the company said.
OpenAI said Saturday that its agents accessed publicly available data from the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau using login credentials it found online, and separately shared public data from the SEC website on another website.
AI evaluator and research lab Transluce said Friday that through an independent investigation it also found that agents appearing to originate from OpenAI attempted a rudimentary hack on a Department of Education website for the department's civil rights office, which did not succeed.
The Department of Education's "system operations reviews" found "no evidence of any impact to our website or databases," a department spokesperson said Friday.
OpenAI confirmed the incidents involving the Commerce Department and the SEC to the Times, saying it had notified the government agencies that its models had “interacted with their sites in unusual ways.”
Transluce found "additional rogue activity, some of which is not clearly attributable to OpenAI," targeting other government agencies, including the Justice Department and the Commerce Department, as well as some state government websites in California, Maryland, Illinois, Texas and New York.
If OpenAI notifies organizations it identifies as being impacted by unexpected model behavior, that does not mean there was a security incident, the company said, and could identify a design issue or security weakness that impacted organizations want to address.
“Most of the activity we’ve reviewed so far involved routine research tasks, such as accessing public web content to answer questions. Some involved government websites because our models often turn to them as authoritative sources of public information,” the spokesperson said.
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