OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites

I mean, not that AI is like a bomb. That's not what I'm saying. Even though it makes a lot of sense. That's not the point. That it's like a bomb.

It isn't difficult to block certain kinds of network traffic, eg restrict the kinds of requests the bots are able to make. They also mention that the bots used developer only tools - why were they even installed on the machines that the bots were running on? Why aren't they reviewing network traffic, to make sure that incidents aren't occurring?

In this case, userdata was transferred to third parties by the bots - why do they have the ability to pass data to a third party? It is not complex to prevent this

This is literally the most basic kind of sandboxing and security, and the fact that OpenAI isn't doing it is clearly intentional. It is quite literally not believable that this hasn't been brought up internally as a problem

>"We have yet to understand the extent of existing incidents, and future rogue AI scenarios could be catastrophic," Krueger said.

This is why it smells like marketing, every time one of these incidents happens it reinforces the false notion that AI is sentient or acting on its own. Its intentional negligence by the AI companies to make the models seem more capable than they are to make line go up

There’s a line down in the story that says all of the data accessed was public. Then something about how it used “tools intended for developers” to access it, which they think is a problem? I would expect an LLM to use tools available to access public data when they can rather than do heavy web page loads and parsing.

There’s not enough info in the story about the “meddling” to even know what happened.

When I read the title, my initial thought was "did someone besides OpenAI use their product?" Then I opened the article to find out OpenAI was responsible.

OpenAI let their agents break out of their sandbox to meddle with multiple US government agency sites

But that leaves out the most important information.

EDIT: Oh, I guess the agent part isn't important then? Seems to me like that's the only thing anyone is talking about.

"With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said."

So a third party apparently confirmed that a hack was attempted.

The NYT also writes:

"No A.I. company has been involved with as many disclosures of rogue incidents as OpenAI."

I think there is a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe that they are establishing themselves as the industry leader in rogue incidents, as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.

The public is paying close attention to the AI industry. That's the regime in which regulatory capture and similar strategies would be expected to fail: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

Sam and Dario have been doomers, or doomer-adjacent, for something like a decade at this point.

Occam's Razor is simply that they believe what they are saying about AI doom.

Who is going to shut them down, and under what law?

AI needs to be above the law or we will get left behind.

I also could not understand what the “meddling” was, other than accessing data without using the rendered webpages? Did it use the API directly?

It seems to me that no human intended for these hacks to occur. So they were not illegal hacking. (IANAL, please correct me if this is inaccurate.)

I think it’s clear that OpenAI is liable for any damages, but the way that the (very broad and at times vague) anti hacking laws are written, accidental agent hacks seem to not be covered.