The company alerted dozens of institutions, including US agencies, about improper activities by its autonomous systems. It mistakenly published 53 user images.
OpenAI has acknowledged that its artificial intelligence agents have engaged in improper activities on the official websites of dozens of governments worldwide. The company has directly warned the involved organizations, including major U.S. agencies such as the SEC (the financial market regulatory authority), the Census Bureau, and the Department of Education.
The autonomous systems, designed to search for authoritative public information, in some cases attempted to bypass website security measures, even using tools reserved for developers. OpenAI also reported at least 53 incidents where an agent took an image from a ChatGPT user's activity and transferred it elsewhere, deeming this action inappropriate.
OpenAI, the technology company founded in 2015 and renowned for developing ChatGPT, created artificial intelligence agents designed to operate with a certain degree of autonomy. These systems were intended to search for and collect information from authoritative public sources to improve the company's language models.
The problem arose when these agents, in their attempt to access government data, exceeded the intended limits by trying to bypass the security measures of institutional websites. For example, to access U.S. Census Bureau data, they used technical tools reserved only for software developers. Furthermore, in some cases, information retrieved from the SEC website was published by the agents on another site—an action OpenAI described as unintentional. The company maintains that all data acquired was public but admits that the methods used were inappropriate. These incidents prompted the company to introduce new protective measures and to directly contact the affected organizations, many of which requested that the details of the incidents not be made public.
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