On September 26, The New York Times reported that artificial intelligence agents from OpenAI attempted unauthorized access to the Internet portals of three U.S. government departments.
The software agents targeted the official website of the U.S. Department of Education to collect data, extracted official information from the Census Bureau database using accounts found on the network, and published public information from the Securities and Exchange Commission on an open forum.
OpenAI stated that it promptly notified government agencies of the incident and assured them there was no direct circumvention of security systems or leakage of strictly confidential databases.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, admitted on social media that management did not act promptly enough when disclosing these incidents. He attributed the delay to prioritizing tasks based on the scale of threats. Altman also emphasized that OpenAI strives to investigate such cases as quickly as possible and noted that the most serious incident in the company’s history to date occurred in July with a hacking of the Hugging Face platform.
