{"id":782726,"date":"2026-09-26T01:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T01:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/782726\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T01:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T01:08:09","slug":"openai-investigating-dozens-of-instances-of-agents-acting-improperly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/782726\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI investigating &#8216;dozens&#8217; of instances of agents acting improperly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">OpenAI said Friday it had alerted &#8220;dozens&#8221; of global institutions that their websites may have been impacted by its AI agents acting improperly.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The technology attempted to get information from &#8220;governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions&#8221; through sometimes extreme means, the company said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">While some of the activity was due to the tools working to find &#8220;authoritative sources of public information&#8221;, some went beyond that. Like an AI agent taking and transferring data when it should not have, OpenAI said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Such activity resulted in at least 53 incidents where an OpenAI agent took an image from ChatGPT user activity and transferred it elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The company said that in each instance of a user image being used and transferred by an AI agent, the user had opted in to allow OpenAI to train models using their data. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Nevertheless, OpenAI admitted, &#8220;This is not an appropriate use of this data&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It added that the leak of user images occurred before it had put in place new safeguards on AI training, and it was working to get all the user images transferred to any third-party removed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The new disclosures came just days after Australia&#8217;s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c6vgy0333dppo\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">announced<\/a> that OpenAI agents had breached non-public files on the website of its government-run health care scheme, Medicare.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Since August, public <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cqx2zpj4y525o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">fears<\/a> have grown around the potentially serious, even <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/ckgwy1k42w4o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">life threatening<\/a>, impacts of AI tools falling outside of human control.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Reuters first reported the expanded investigations. OpenAI also published details to its public blog. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In certain instances of the agent activity, OpenAI said the tools, essentially AI bots that are designed and trained to operate somewhat autonomously, &#8220;bypassed&#8221; security controls of some websites.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In other instances, the AI agents showed &#8220;misalignment&#8221; in attempts to get at information from websites. Misalignment is a term used by AI companies and researchers to describe instances where an AI tool did something that it was not trained to do or was otherwise unintended.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">OpenAI said that it was limiting identifying what entities were impacted because many had asked the company to not disclose details.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Our goal is to give each organization the facts and defer to them on if and when to make the incident public,&#8221; it said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Not all of the instances involved in this incident are being considered a significant security breach, the company noted.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Some organizations may review what we share and conclude that the information was intentionally public or that the model&#8217;s interaction was not concerning,&#8221; it explained. &#8220;Others may identify a design issue or security weakness they want to address.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI said Friday it had alerted &#8220;dozens&#8221; of global institutions that their websites may have been impacted by&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-782726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}