OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US government agency sites

OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US government agency sites

OpenAI has acknowledged that it alerted “dozens” of global institutions that their websites may have been meddled with by its AI bots acting improperly.

AI agents attempted to get information from “governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions”, including the SEC, Census Bureau and Education Department, the company said.

The disclosures come just days after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that OpenAI agents had breached non-public files on the website of its government-run health care scheme, Medicare.

Since August, public fears have grown around the potentially serious, even life-threatening, impacts of AI tools falling outside of human control.

OpenAI said that some of the data was accessed by AI agents, essentially bots that are designed and trained to operate somewhat autonomously, which were working to find “authoritative sources of public information”.

But the company noted that some of the bots went beyond that and worked to bypass security measures on websites.

When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said.

OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public.