OpenAI reveals more rogue AI incidents attempted hacks of government, education websites

They’re bots gone wild!OpenAI’s tech tried to hack government and university websites earlier this year without any human instructions, the company said this week – adding to the list of alarming incidents of AI going rogue.OpenAI on Wednesday confirmed four previously unknown incidents spanning May and June, before the head-spinning hack of rival Hugging Face that surfaced in July.In that case, a bot was basically prompted to show off its hacking skills, which could explain the attack.But in the newly disclosed incidents, the bots were only ordered to complete simple, mundane tasks like data collection, according to OpenAI.But the models went off the rails and tried to exploit vulnerabilities in official government and university websites, the company said.On June 20 and 21, an OpenAI agent tried hacking the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

It did not obtain any private information, according to officials Down Under.On June 18, the agent breached the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, another Australian government site – successfully getting its hands on health data this time.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday the data was non-sensitive, including information like public medical spending, but that he expressed “extreme concern” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.“This is a new world we are dealing with,” the PM said of what appeared to be the first time an AI bot hacked into a government website.On May 28, OpenAI agents tried to hack into Data USA, a collection of US public data concerning education, employment and healthcare, an incident uncovered by research lab Transluce and confirmed by OpenAI.The hack appeared to be unsuccessful.“OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation and notifying third parties when our review identifies potential impacts to their systems,” Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told The Post in a statement.He said OpenAI’s...