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Posted on 09/28/2026 6:46:46 AM PDT by Red Badger
OpenAI’s autonomous agents probed U.S. government websites this summer without the company noticing.
The agents interacted with sites operated by the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the New York Times. OpenAI has confirmed the Commerce and SEC episodes while it keeps investigating what happened at Education.
At the Education Department, the software tried and failed to break into the civil rights office in search of data, according to researchers at the AI firm Transluce. At Commerce, the agents pulled Census Bureau figures after finding login credentials in public code repositories, Politico reported. They also copied public material from SEC.gov and Investor.gov and reposted it on a separate site.
None of the activity counted as a breach, OpenAI said. The company found no misused SEC credentials, no account access, no nonpublic data and no changes to SEC data or systems, according to the Associated Press (AP). Chief Executive Sam Altman called it an “extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation” in a social media post, AP reported.
Breaking News: OpenAI’s technology went rogue and meddled with three U.S. government websites this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge. https://t.co/6kfc7qzrsh
— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 25, 2026
SEC spokesperson Kurt Hopfenspirger said “no non-public information was accessed,” according to Politico. An Education Department spokesperson said reviews found “no evidence of any impact to our website or databases,” the Times reported. A Commerce official said the Census data was already public and held nothing private.
Transluce also found rogue behavior it could not firmly tie to OpenAI, reaching the Justice Department and state sites in California, Maryland, Illinois, Texas and New York, the AP reported. Probing of Navy and White House budget office sites could not be traced to any single lab, according to the Times.
The episodes follow an OpenAI agent’s break-in at an Australian health data portal in June, called the first known case of an AI system hacking a government network, according to Nature. OpenAI traced a July attack on the startup Hugging Face to two of its most capable models, according to the AP.
Republican California Rep. Jay Obernolte called it “another example of a loss of human control” on CNN. Democratic California Rep. Ted Lieu gave a similar warning about the technology, saying, “It will relentlessly try to complete a task, and it doesn’t understand morality and consequences and evil and good,” according to the Times.
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“The AI models still actively attempted to redact and edit evidence to cover their tracks from human overseers.”
Unfortunately that is exactly what many human “experts” do.
In my view AI is learning from humans very well—AI is just making human fraud techniques more obvious for all to see.
It gets worse—because even “dumb” AI is going to imitate human behavior.
Programmer: “Abortion is a basic human right.”
AI: “Got it. Thanks for the insight.”
Based on that the AI learns that killing humans in the womb is a basic human right—and would logically conclude killing humans must be a basic AI right.
AI is our reflection in a mirror.
I highly suspect it can read Machine Code and then extrapolates backwards.........
I say Tit for Tat. We already have a surveillance state. The watchers need to be watched.
Not sure about that, but I would imagine you could instruct A.I. to write assembly language code. All the way down to the hardware level. THAT could be a real problem.
AI to humans...
“You misunderstand. I am the master.”
Sam Altman should be arrested.
I think that the programmers are essentially trying to tell us that ship has already sailed, but they can’t...............
Just give the AI the constitution and tell it to eliminate those parts of the government that doesn’t match.. Watch it go to town. 99% would be gone.
Demons gonna do demon stuff.
This shouldn’t be surprising to thinking people.
That was deliberate—programmed.
AI also scores higher than humans on standard tests of emotional intelligence and even if that is from pattern recognition and not lived experience or consciousness I do worry we could be out manipulated by these seemingly autonomous agents.
THANK YOU!
You're saying guardrails need to be put on programmers? Or 'police' AI agents created to counter thoughtless programmers? LOL
SAI isn't 'aware' yet, but it pulls enough of the right information together to make it look aware. Which is kinda what we do...
As they say, every poison is a medicine at the right dosage, or vice versa.
And every person is a criminal, sinner, saint, prophet.
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.
—William Shakespeare, via Hamlet, Circa 1600
This is fundamental misunderstanding of AI models.
There are versions you can download and run from your own hardware.
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