OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue; The New York Times, September 25, 2026

 Kate CongerAna Swanson and Cecilia Kang , The New York Times; OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue

"OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes.

The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C. were confirmed by OpenAI, which said it was continuing to investigate the situation with the Department of Education. The San Francisco company said it notified the government agencies in recent weeks that its A.I. agents — which are bots that can act autonomously — had interacted with their sites in unusual ways.

With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried hacking the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said. The A.I. also pulled data from the Census Bureau website, which is housed at the Commerce Department, using login credentials it found online. Separately, OpenAI’s agents shared public data from the S.E.C. website on an online forum.

None of the incidents were breaches, OpenAI said, but were examples of its technology behaving in unexpected and concerning ways. The company recently discovered the occurrences while conducting a review of hacks carried out by its technology, including an attack on an Australian government website in June and on the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July."

Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.; The New York Times, September 3, 2026

 Kevin Roose, The New York Times; Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.

"When I first heard the news this summer that a group of artificial intelligence agents created by OpenAI had hacked into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company, I filed it in the “Bad but Probably Not Catastrophic A.I. Safety Incidents” subfolder of my brain.

After all, no one at Hugging Face died. No critical infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t even clear, at the time, whether the OpenAI bots had intended to attack Hugging Face, or whether they had simply been a little bumbling and confused and went looking on Hugging Face’s servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity test they’d been given.

But last week, two postmortem reports on the incident — one by OpenAI and another by two independent A.I. research organizations, METR and Redwood Research — changed my mind and significantly upgraded my overall worry about A.I.

I won’t rehash all of the details, which have been extensively summarized elsewhere. (The podcaster and writer Dwarkesh Patel has an accessible breakdown of the reports if you want to dive deeper, and my colleague Dylan Freedman spoke to the researchers at METR and Redwood Research.) But here are a few of the most harrowing new facts:..

This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science — figuring out why certain groups of A.I. agents collaborate peacefully, while others turn to crime and destruction to get what they want."