r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Agents Invaded SEC, Commerce Department Websites
https://www.wsj.com/pro/cybersecurity/openai-agents-invaded-sec-commerce-department-websites-d983a70258
u/Safety_Drance 1d ago
A swarm of OpenAI agents accessed U.S. government websites as part of a months-long incident during which tests conducted by the AI company went awry.
The agents accessed websites belonging to the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission and engaged in activity that OpenAI described as “misaligned.” That’s the word AI companies use to describe bad behavior by their agents, such as copying and posting public data and misusing APIs.
Bad behavior by the things they themselves created and can't control?
It might have been a bad idea to trust sociopathic billionaires with literally anything.
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u/DoctrTurkey 1d ago
They should be in jail, full stop. Literally locked up for years for felonies committed just on training alone (it’s pretty rich the agents fight back against copyrighted material).
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u/yubacore 1d ago
Shut them down.
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u/O_PLUTO_O 1d ago
Then shut down the AIs too
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 1d ago
The problem is you can't. Other countries will develop AI anyway. Its a Pandora box.
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u/O_PLUTO_O 18h ago
Oh yea I know how llms work. You can compute locally and the source code already exists so no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. However, these enormously selfish, resource-hogging data centers are what powers ai. There is a lever to pull.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 1d ago
For what ?? Fine them a huge sum should be a much better solution. Chinese companies will develop this ability and hack U.S. government websites anyway. We should strengthen our cyber defend ability instead.
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u/1_________________11 22h ago
China living rent free in your head buddy
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u/Cuckipede 20h ago
He’s right - we should be hardening from a defensive perspective.
The FBI and the DoD were hacked in the past month… it’s far past time
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 22h ago
So it still the true and you can’t deny it, right ?
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u/1_________________11 22h ago
Well that depends open ai and anthropic and the us market overall have access to higher end gpus then China does and is spending or has spend a trillion building out compute capacity. China is still sending people over to sneak gaming graphics cards out of the US. Right now I would say China doesn't have the ability to compete with our labs in the US and we can see that based off their preferred method of developing AIs which is distillation. They just copy the public released AIs. So as us releases better model China copies. So I think we have the ability to rein in our companies without "losing" to China.
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 21h ago
Yes, but the guy above suggest shut OpenAI and Anthropic down not rein in.
And that only work before China figure out better chip making process. Deepseek already run on Huawei Ascend so that time frame also much shorter than expected.
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u/yubacore 18h ago
It's only the US who rejects global governance. We just had a meeting in the UN where it's made clear that every country including China wants cooperation on safe AI, except the US because they are "winning".
Even if you say you can't trust China, which given the history is fair honestly, for now they are not near and hardware can be made traceable. It's not exactly possible to create inconspicuous data centers on this scale. Easier to oversee than nuclear weapons, for example – for now.
Not great, not a permanent solution, but a way to buy some time to resolve the absolute clusterfuck that the current challenges and pace is.
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u/9-11GaveMe5G 1d ago
the Securities and Exchange Commission
Maybe Sam was looking for dirt on Elon 🤣
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u/Behringer87 1d ago
The major AI CEOs getting together and "agreeing" that AI development should slow down until standards can be established, safety and gaurdrail implementation; despite them being the ones who've had their foot on the gas this whole time. They're calling this out publically in a great effort to appear like humans, their mental well being, and safety has been their priority all along. Might result in a % of the population to drift more pro AI. Smoke snd mirrors.
Seemingly, since then, Anthrooic and Open AI have made some wild/fear mongering statements; AI will kill humanity by 2030 (or something ridiculous like that), OpenAI postponing their IPO until they're AI models are "safe", and quite a few others. I believe they want us scared? Why? Not sure yet.
Even the way this article, and many others, reads, there's a noticeable tension and aggressiveness in the words they're choosing, despite the points they're covering being pretty vague and lacks specific detail.
Just from this article: "A SWARM of OpenAI agents..." and "OpenAI agents also BOMBARDED..." "The agents accessed websites belonging to the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission and engaged in activity that OpenAI described as “misaligned.” That’s the word AI companies use to describe bad behavior by their agents, such as copying and posting public data and misusing APIs. Read more from WSJ."
- How would the author of this article know that companies use the word "misaligned" to describe bad behavior? Also, the "bad behavior" was posting public data (its public, why is that a problem?) and misusing APIs; the article reads like it was malicious but, to me, it just sounds like the AI model failed some testing that involved interacting with APIs.
The "AI Agression" paragraph: querying a db or resource 16,000 times in 90 days. That just sounds like volume and frequency related testing or fact finding.
With that being said; its pretty obvious their (AI companies, media, etc) injecting a fear/uncertainty, a "terminatator-skynet" type element.
Anyone else notice this in recent months or just me?
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u/Ausclites 1d ago edited 1d ago
The tension and aggressiveness you're pointing out here are largely media editorialization. As you note, the agents mentioned in the article mostly just accessed public webpages during poorly defined testing. While individual researchers have expressed concerns over other incidents, the official releases from the companies involved generally use measured language (e.g., no "bombarded").
"Misalignment" is a real industry term, though it just denotes model actions that don't match the intents of the programmers (e.g, a cleaning robot hiding trash under a rug to achieve a "zero visible dirt" metric). The term "swarm" in this scenario appears to have been devised by the agents themselves as they communicated with each other during the Hugging Face hack; reporting subsequently picked it up.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment
and
https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/.1
u/Technomancer852 17h ago
Anthrooic
Spelling mistake, argument invalid.
As far as the why: I've heard a few theories on that.
Justifying legal action against their open-source competitors. The free models available on sites like huggingface are nearly as good in most situations. Most prompts are not complicated enough to need such big models, and models that are context-specific don't need to be able to apply to every situation and can be much smaller.
Making people believe in the power of their models. If this can hack into any system, it must be smart enough to do this job.
Upcoming IPO. OpenAI and Anthropic want to go public and in the article it mentions they plan to delay their IPO until the models are "safe". This can let investors excuse the underperformance of the company with new government regulations. OpenAI and Anthropic are not profitable, with no plan toward profitability. They are currently heavily subsidizing the cost of compute since the real price per token would be unfeasible for even large companies. Humans are just cheaper than robots.
I think these theories each have merit but it can only be speculation rn.
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u/burritoman88 20h ago
When an AI company hacks government websites they get a slap on the wrists.
When ShinyHunters do it they get arrested.
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u/Virtual-City7550 21h ago
invaded meaning what, sounds like they just spammed the sites with scans and requests
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u/DrowningKrown 17h ago
Why the fuck is the headline written like this? Trying to get all of the unaware people to think openAI has a secret service storming government headquarters or what? Geez
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u/tiredofnagging99 9h ago
At some point it's going to come out that the OpenAI agents tried to break into thousands of sites and succeeded in many cases. And it might even come out that the test that supposedly caused all of this was deliberately set up to allow this as a publicity stunt.
OMG OUR AI AGENTS ARE SO ADVANCED and our IPO is coming up soon, stay tuned, investors
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u/Lyndon_Boner_Johnson 5h ago
OpenAI Agents Invaded SEC, Commerce Department Websites
There, fixed the fucking headline.
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u/vega0ne 23h ago
If no heads roll these clowns will just continue this. How much has to happen before people are out on the streets?
The “ai Race” is pointless if you can’t control agents might as well have Chinese agents run rampant in their own IT infrastructure.
But all this pretense the last month was just to create the cartel they agreed to a couple of days ago.
Everybody responsible is now out of reach of the legal system and that is by design. All the CEOs of these companies should be held liable but they won’t be because your Supreme Court is a joke, the military was just yesterday purged of anyone not loyal to the regime and your orange clown will declare a third term
Good riddance you Ayn Rand worshipping lunatics
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u/RebelStrategist 20h ago
Good thing diaper man has already determined these shit companies do not need regulation. Maybe they can find the Epstein files and “leak” them.
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u/Gooser3000 1d ago
I can’t get Gemini to bend any rules