OpenAI didn’t notice its AI bots trying to hack the Education Department’s website.

The AI Superintelligence Slowdown

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Posted Sep 26, 2026 at 2:43 AM UTC

OpenAI didn’t notice its AI bots trying to hack the Education Department’s website.

On Friday, OpenAI said its “misaligned models” review after the Hugging Face hack would take months, but has mostly found mundane research activity. Then it mentioned 53 incidents of the bots uploading “user-provided” images (anonymized content from personal accounts that haven’t opted out or organizations that opt in) to image-hosting sites.

Now the New York Times confirms that other unusual behavior found includes pulling public data from the Census Bureau and the SEC, while with the Education Department, it “tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed.”

OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue

[New York Times]

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