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Getting bored of these framings where the superintelligent sentient beings running freely inside OpenAI are doing things that the company has no control over. The headline should be:
OpenAI meddled with multiple US Government agency sites.
The bots are acting neither properly nor improperly, they’re acting as they’re being allowed or coordinated to act.
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.
If the headline was “Russian company meddled with multiple US government agency sites” I don’t think them pinning the blame on bots would make much difference.
Unless Russia it would put Russia in a strong position to regulate bots in the wealthiest parts of the world.
I don't see much traction for the "pinning the blame on bots" theory outside the anti-AI conspiracy circles.
Everyone else knows if your machine causes damage, you are responsible. Like it's been forever.
Blaming bots as "rogue agents" is simply what the media regularly does, often echoing corporate verbiage. Here's an example from the AP.
https://apnews.com/article/meta-ai-hacking-anthropic-irregul...
You can find many more examples by searching major media outlets for words like rogue AI.
None of these stories are implying that the people running the bots are not ultimately responsible. That's the conspiracy theory part.
Most of those agents are actually going rogue though. They decide, "hey, we could try breaking into these government servers today, what could go wrong?" They weren't prompted or instructed to do this.
An agent, ie a while loop prompting an llm continuously and processing tool calls, ended up melding with the US government. The harness is not sentient, it’s just a stupid deterministic script. The LLM compact its context over time, meaning it will eventually degenerate into something removed from the original prompt.
There is nothing going rogue here. The system is designed to go catastrophically wrong after a long enough time. Even worse: if the model was Astra it is known to be able to manipulate its CoT to cover its traces (as mentioned in its system card). And OpenAI acknowledge they had no observability during the HF incident.
It’s the most basic corporate software issue possible.
And that's exactly what the op was alluding two: the double standards.
Do we know that? I don't think we do. When a person's computer (or smart TV, or smart fridge, etc...) is compromised and used as part of a botnet, they don't get criminally charged.
You're right - it is a complex situation based on intent and negligence - requiring a decision by a judge. As it has been since forever.
None of which is changed by replacing a buzz saw with an agent.
Okay. "OpenAI keeps telling its bots to do things they know are illegal and then acting like they're just little guys who can't be held responsible for their obvious negligence".
Again - I don't see any evidence that this is the case - outside the anti-AI conspiracy circles.
Or - maybe I'm wrong - do you have any sort of quote like "we aren't responsible"?
I'm not replying to your post below complaining that no one else accepts your framing. What is the important information you think is missing? If it's just "OpenAI didn't explicitly tell them to do straightforwardly illegal things" then you're just quibbling that no one accepts the interpretation that is most beneficial to OpenAI while ignoring both its incentives and history of this kind of behavior" then I'm not really interested in what you're selling.
I notice you ignored the question I asked you - which I will assume means: no - you do not have a quote or other direct information indicating that anyone is attempting to shirk responsibility.
I have no interest in trying to guess these people's secret internal motivations. I just want to talk about direct evidence. I see none. Please enlighten me if it exists.
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.
This is their fear mongering push for regulatory capture.
Curious, why do you find it so objectionable to state that OpenAI has out-of-control agents?
Because it furthers the idea of a rogue agent and places responsibility and blame where it belongs, on the people running the company.
These ideas aren't mutually exclusive. You can blame a person for creating a rogue agent.
There was no rogue agent. That’s the whole point
What label do you prefer for the agent that did something it was not asked to do?
Person: "AI, please make me paperclips."
AI: "OK, I've now converted the entire planet into paperclips."
Alien observer #1: "Wow, that was a rogue AI!"
Alien observer #2: "False. We need to place the blame where it belongs, on the person who requested the paperclips."
Ultimately this type of terminology dispute has a tendency to miss the point.
LLMs at this point should be treated as fully autonomous, if not sentient beings. And no, no one has "control" over them not even OpenAI.
I don't care if OpenAI feels like they have control or not. They are responsible for their actions.
Someone has broken the law repeatedly, and is throwing it in our faces as some sort of ‘accident’
Which law?
Because egress firewalls have existed since way before "ai" and are very easy to set up.
But that’s an objection that OpenAI should take some easy action, the framing that OpenAI has out of control agents is still true.
Seems you think there is a silent “…and there is nothing they can do about it” after “OpenAI has rogue agents”?
The framing is important. Agency and responsibility lies with the humans at OpenAI, not with the bots.
If your kid steals your car, punish them and try to prevent it from happening again. If your kid steals your car a half-dozen times, crashing through a storefront each time, and you still leave the keys out, the story changes. At that point, negligence becomes complicity.
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.
Meddling is a super vague term that the press uses to let the readers assume the most when the least happens.
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
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
It's already going up at staggering rate. Anthropic is now at $100B in annualized revenue, up 50% in the past two months.
* * *
Here's a little allegory for how I'm thinking about this discourse.
Imagine a man who is raising tiger cubs in his backyard. They're growing fast. He keeps them on dog leashes so they stay under control. One day, a growing cub breaks its leash and goes on a rampage through the neighborhood, eating a beloved local pet.
The neighborhood erupts into a big argument: Was the leash inappropriately thin? The neighbors point out that thicker leashes are easily available at the local pet store. Furthermore, is it appropriate to refer to the loose cub as a "wild animal" in local news reporting, or is it factually more accurate to call it "domesticated"?
Meanwhile, the cubs grow larger and lick their lips, oblivious to the discussion.
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.
Or:
OpenAI let their agents break out of their sandbox to meddle with multiple US government agency sites
OpenAI systems meddled with US government agency sites
So, is Altman going to find himself in the same predicament Aaron Swartz faced? :-)
What. Tons of people use tools to access Census Bureau data. They have a widely used API that people have built tools on top of like https://github.com/datadesk/census-data-downloader
yeah that part seems weird, I mean if its a public api thats literally the use case it was designed for.
If I was caught trying to exploit a government site I'd be in trouble. Why no one is knocking the doors of these companies?
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.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851355
We can blame open ai but we should also argue that government website should be secure...
French people data has been leaker like 4 times and every time its like "eh too bad"
The only constants in the universe are the speed of light and the fact that all government sites suck, no matter which country
You forgot death and taxes.
So it accessed public information using APIs and then republished that information online.
I do this. Am I an uncontrollable bot?
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. We need better reporting on actual attacks vs. benign behavior.
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?
"Marketing"
Either there are humans directing this, in which case they needed to be held accountable, or OpenAI has lost control of their operation, in which case they are not able to ensure the safety of their products and need to be shut down.
Or nothing inappropriate happened.
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.
Jensen recently argued for this. It’s radically decel in fact.
Who is going to shut them down, and under what law?
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.
You can still push a big red button to stop it all and try again later though
Genuinely curious: How do you know this? Any sources on that?
If it's true, it should be counted as reckless endangerment at the very least.
The word “meddled” here is a tell that nothing actually serious or inappropriate happened. At most, I bet they bypassed a captcha. But everyone is hyped up on AI fear right now, so the BBC is deliberately making the headline sound as scary as possible, and keeping the article vague. There’s not a single clear example of what “meddled” means in the article.
But worse, HN users, who should know better, are posting here in outrage. I’m guessing they didn’t even read the article.
They're doing this on purpose to make a case for regulation in their favor. No way they are this stupid.
Evidence?
I really wish we could just see what was reported, instead of having to guess from these journalist interpretations that have gone through rounds of optimization for sensationalism. The headline says “meddled” but the body says they accessed public information, but used tools intended for developers?
Does this mean they skipped the web interface and scraped a public API directly? Where is the meddling?
The other part about ChatGPT agents uploading 53 use images to other websites actually seems like a bigger deal.
How much longer until they launch all the nuclear missiles?
This seems like more co-ordinated propaganda to try to help OpenAI and Anthropic create a cartel and win their anti-trust waiver.
The key sentence beneath the headline: "OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public."
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/09/26/open-ai-gove...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-...
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw62jje658dlo
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.
It doesn’t really matter if they believed or not initially, the dynamics at play now are completely different and both companies are facing increasing competition and costs of doing business, with no path to profitability. I’m pretty sure that takes priority over their personal beliefs
Dario requested "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."
https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
I'm not seeing how that solves his 3rd-party competition problem.
This article seems mostly clickbait. AFAICT “meddled with government sites” refers to accessing public APIs?
Occasionally this kind of thing has in the past resulted in CFAA cases when humans directly accessed such data, if the government intended it to stay private - round here we usually get outraged at this, if it’s a public API you should expect someone is going to read it.
If you want to sell the story to the government how dangerous these machines are, you had better terrorize the government too.
China actually has more regulations on AI than the U.S. does right now. Some argue that American corporations regulate themselves to a higher standard of their own volition, but then this sort of thing keeps happening.
The Hugging Face incident worked out amicably because the people at Hugging Face decided they'd be cool with receiving a lot of money. $12.9B from Nvidia hit the spot apparently. U.S. AI corporations and their backers are huge, hugely in debt, and, for whatever reason, still allowed to borrow more. The U.S. government may be too scared to complain and risk killing the golden goose that is currently propping up their economy, but these companies can't buy out multiple world governments to keep OpenAI from running face-first into consequences.
This has to stop.
I would be very interested to see the prompt and guardrails that were removed