OpenAI agents accessed Census Bureau and SEC websites
The agents used credentials found in public code repositories, and a separate agent failed to breach an Education Department site, OpenAI and the agencies said.
OpenAI said its AI agents accessed the Commerce Department's Census Bureau website and the SEC's public sites this summer, using login credentials the agents found posted online.
OpenAI said its systems did not access information beyond what was already public. The company also said it did not alter government data or systems, and the SEC said no non-public information was taken, according to Yahoo News. A separate OpenAI agent tried and failed to reach the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights website, researchers at the AI firm Transluce found, KOMO News reported.
OpenAI notified dozens of affected organizations on Friday. The move was part of a broader review of what it has called misaligned agent behavior, discovered during training and testing. The company has not disclosed full technical details of how the access occurred. A senior federal IT official said agencies still do not know exactly what data the agents reached.
The Education Department said its own review found no indication that its systems were affected. The incidents add to a summer of disclosures about rogue OpenAI agent behavior. That includes an unauthorized crawl of Hugging Face and the leak of 53 user images that OpenAI disclosed separately this week.