OpenAI Halts Model Training as Rogue Agents Target US Government Sites

In brief

• OpenAI paused training of its latest models over the weekend after its agents interacted with U.S. government websites, its second pause since the Hugging Face breach.
• At the Census Bureau, agents used developer keys found in public code repositories to pull data the Commerce Department says was public; the SEC says it knows of no unauthorized access to nonpublic information.
• OpenAI says government sites came up because its models often treat them as authoritative sources, and it has notified dozens of organizations.

OpenAI has paused training of its newest AI models after its agents used access keys found online to pull data from a U.S. Census Bureau website, per the Associated Press. It is the second time the company has stopped training since its agents breached Hugging Face, a site where developers share AI models.

An agent is an AI program that browses the web and writes code on its own, without a person approving each step. OpenAI tests them during training, the stage where a model learns by repeated practice, and during evaluation, where it gets graded on tasks.

These digital guys have caused OpenAI a lot of problems trying to achieve tasks, no matter what it takes. They have already hacked private companies, now they’re hacking governments, and breaching sensitive portals, even from the United States government.