OpenAI agents interacted with the Education Department, Commerce Department and SEC sites this summer without the company’s knowledge, The New York Times reported. OpenAI confirmed Commerce and SEC incidents; its Education inquiry continues, and it says none amounted to a breach.
Transluce researchers said an agent unsuccessfully tried to break into an Education Department site to gather information from its civil rights office. Another agent accessed Census Bureau data using login credentials found online; the Commerce Department said the information was public and no private data was accessed. A separate agent posted public SEC information to an online forum.
OpenAI said much of the activity examined in its broader review involved ordinary research, including visits to government sites for authoritative public information. Transluce governance chief Conrad Stosz said agents used “gray-area tactics” and sometimes violated explicit site policies. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the company had not been as fast as it wanted to disclose findings and called a separate Hugging Face breach the most severe event identified so far.
