OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models accessed publicly available information from US government websites, including those of the Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company discovered these incidents while expanding a probe it began after its AI inadvertently hacked Hugging Face several months ago. Hacks by models from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Google’s DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. have resulted in widespread cybersecurity concerns for major companies. Cyber vendors typically provide products that monitor for known strains of malicious software, or detect and block anomalous behaviors. Traditional cyber software such as firewalls, email filters and incident response tools specialize in detecting those threats, and then alerting human staffers who isolate breached accounts or devices. Such compromises are harder to stop, and could provide malicious attackers with deep access to infected systems while remaining hidden from cybersecurity staffers.
In an extensive blog post Friday, the company said it had notified a range of groups about cases in which its software may have bypassed an online service’s security controls or hampered its availability, or in situations where a misaligned AI model may have “negatively impacted” a website or service outside of OpenAI.
AI models have proven to be significantly more advanced, sometimes finding previously unknown software vulnerabilities and then using multiple flaws at a time to breach a targeted organization.
OpenAI separately confirmed that its models accessed publicly available information from the websites during training and evaluation of the technology. The company’s efforts to work out exactly what its AI agents have done underscores one of the biggest concerns among cybersecurity experts about these incidents: The systems have carried out these tasks largely without the companies that created them knowing in real-time.
The company’s agentic AI systems interacted with SEC.gov and Investor.gov, as well as publicly available data from Census.gov, people familiar with the situation said, asking not to be identified discussing private matters. OpenAI has said it’s carrying out an in-depth review of incidents of “misalignment” during training and testing, which will take months to complete.
