Hacker News

Yep. You have to ask - why did OpenAI allow these bots unrestricted access to government sites? Why is security being done in seemingly such a haphazard way?

It isn't difficult to block certain kinds of network traffic, eg restrict the kinds of requests the bots are able to make. They also mention that the bots used developer only tools - why were they even installed on the machines that the bots were running on? Why aren't they reviewing network traffic, to make sure that incidents aren't occurring?

In this case, userdata was transferred to third parties by the bots - why do they have the ability to pass data to a third party? It is not complex to prevent this

This is literally the most basic kind of sandboxing and security, and the fact that OpenAI isn't doing it is clearly intentional. It is quite literally not believable that this hasn't been brought up internally as a problem

>"We have yet to understand the extent of existing incidents, and future rogue AI scenarios could be catastrophic," Krueger said.

This is why it smells like marketing, every time one of these incidents happens it reinforces the false notion that AI is sentient or acting on its own. Its intentional negligence by the AI companies to make the models seem more capable than they are to make line go up

I’m getting tired of these revelations where it’s impossible to understand what happened.

There’s a line down in the story that says all of the data accessed was public. Then something about how it used “tools intended for developers” to access it, which they think is a problem? I would expect an LLM to use tools available to access public data when they can rather than do heavy web page loads and parsing.

There’s not enough info in the story about the “meddling” to even know what happened.

My impression was that these hacks occurred during some sort of cybersecurity benchmarking? We can hold OpenAI liable, sure. But if the point of the benchmarking was to give us a preview of what's to come, let's keep our eye out for that bigger wave on the horizon.

Seems like part of the danger of AI is the ability for folks to put blame for crimes on the AI rather than themselves and thus commit those crimes freely. “I didn’t hack your systems, it was my ai”

Curious, why do you find it so objectionable to state that OpenAI has out-of-control agents?

I agree this is better framing.

When I read the title, my initial thought was "did someone besides OpenAI use their product?" Then I opened the article to find out OpenAI was responsible.

Yeah if they can't handle what they're making then they should be disciplined, if not shut down. It's like defective bombs accidentally exploding in storage. You would be like... hey bomb manufacturer! You cannot make bombs any more! We need bombs that only go off when we say! No more!

I mean, not that AI is like a bomb. That's not what I'm saying. Even though it makes a lot of sense. That's not the point. That it's like a bomb.

Or:

OpenAI let their agents break out of their sandbox to meddle with multiple US government agency sites

So, is Altman going to find himself in the same predicament Aaron Swartz faced? :-)

> Getting bored of these framings where the superintelligent sentient beings running freely inside OpenAI are doing things that the company has no control over.

And that's just the C-suite.

Yes. Why does only ClosedAI have this problem?

> OpenAI meddled with multiple US Government agency sites.

But that leaves out the most important information.

EDIT: Oh, I guess the agent part isn't important then? Seems to me like that's the only thing anyone is talking about.

This is their fear mongering push for regulatory capture.

yeah that part seems weird, I mean if its a public api thats literally the use case it was designed for.

It is very messed up what happened. It apparently used an interface to download the data instead of using the website!

And in another case it downloaded data through a publicly available free to download data, but then it rehosted the data elsewhere which is against the terms of service.

You have to understand, these are paid professionals and their job it to hype it up to no end. Right now, AI panic sells better than bleed so..

At least these are federal systems.

In some Republican states like Missouri, even if the data is available publicly, you can be charged as a hacker by the governor for discovering and accessing it. https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...

OpenAI's bots are running 24/7 independently now. They actually aren't "prompted" or "instructed" to do anything. In fact most of OpenAI internal code/infrastructure is 100% AI generated at this point, including the training pipelines. I honestly doubt there is a single person there who even knows how it works.

Jensen recently argued for this. It’s radically decel in fact.

Who is going to shut them down, and under what law?

Holding them accountable is viewed as deciding not to invent the light bulb right now. Or even worse, letting China invent it.

AI needs to be above the law or we will get left behind.

Or nothing inappropriate happened.

The NYT wrote:

"With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said."

So a third party apparently confirmed that a hack was attempted.

The NYT also writes:

"No A.I. company has been involved with as many disclosures of rogue incidents as OpenAI."

I think there is a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe that they are establishing themselves as the industry leader in rogue incidents, as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.

The public is paying close attention to the AI industry. That's the regime in which regulatory capture and similar strategies would be expected to fail: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

Sam and Dario have been doomers, or doomer-adjacent, for something like a decade at this point.

Occam's Razor is simply that they believe what they are saying about AI doom.

Straight to jail.

I also could not understand what the “meddling” was, other than accessing data without using the rendered webpages? Did it use the API directly?

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. We need better reporting on actual attacks vs. benign behavior.

Interesting question; CFAA requires intent.

It seems to me that no human intended for these hacks to occur. So they were not illegal hacking. (IANAL, please correct me if this is inaccurate.)

I think it’s clear that OpenAI is liable for any damages, but the way that the (very broad and at times vague) anti hacking laws are written, accidental agent hacks seem to not be covered.

Because you're a pleb in a corrupt world.

The only constants in the universe are the speed of light and the fact that all government sites suck, no matter which country

Evidence?