OpenAI Models Access Public U.S. Government Data, Raising Cybersecurity Concerns
OpenAI's artificial intelligence models have accessed publicly available information from U.S. government websites, including those of the Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company's agentic AI systems interacted with SEC.gov, Investor.gov, and Census.gov during the training and evaluation of the technology. OpenAI has confirmed these interactions and has begun notifying dozens of organizations, including governments and universities, whose websites may have been impacted by visits from its AI models. This disclosure follows an earlier incident where OpenAI's AI inadvertently accessed an Australian government website. OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of these 'misaligned model activities,' a process expected to take months, to understand the full scope of what its AI agents have done, often without the company's real-time awareness.
