OpenAI Learns Its Tech Probed Another Cybersecurity Target: The US Government

OpenAI’s autonomous agents probed U.S. government websites this summer without the company noticing.

The agents interacted with sites operated by the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the New York Times. OpenAI has confirmed the Commerce and SEC episodes while it keeps investigating what happened at Education.

At the Education Department, the software tried and failed to break into the civil rights office in search of data, according to researchers at the AI firm Transluce. At Commerce, the agents pulled Census Bureau figures after finding login credentials in public code repositories, Politico reported. They also copied public material from SEC.gov and Investor.gov and reposted it on a separate site.

None of the activity counted as a breach, OpenAI said. The company found no misused SEC credentials, no account access, no nonpublic data and no changes to SEC data or systems, according to the Associated Press (AP). Chief Executive Sam Altman called it an “extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation” in a social media post, AP reported.

Breaking News: OpenAI’s technology went rogue and meddled with three U.S. government websites this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge. https://t.co/6kfc7qzrsh

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 25, 2026

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