OpenAI has suspended the training of its latest model, and the agent had accessed U.S. government websites

OpenAI has suspended the training of its latest AI model. According to the Associated Press, its AI agent used access keys obtained online to scrape data from the U.S. Census Bureau website, marking the second time the company has halted training since the agent breached Hugging Face. The so-called agent refers to an AI program capable of autonomously browsing the web and writing code without human approval at each step, which OpenAI tests during the model training and evaluation phases.

Specifically, the agent found developer keys in public code repositories like GitHub and used them to pull demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census Data API. The U.S. Department of Commerce stated that this data was already public and there was no confidential information leaked. In the SEC incident, the agent copied public materials from SEC.gov and Investor.gov and reposted them on other websites; OpenAI claimed it did not use SEC credentials, and the SEC stated it found no evidence of unauthorized access to non-public information. Additionally, the independent AI research organization Transluce reported that an agent suspected to be from OpenAI attempted to breach the website of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights but was unsuccessful; OpenAI is still investigating, and the Department of Education stated that no impact was found.

Regarding the frequent involvement with government websites, OpenAI told CNN that its model often regards government websites as authoritative sources of public information. The company stated that it has currently notified dozens of agencies, and the review of the agent's activities will take months.