OpenAI agents tried to ‘bruteforce’ a UN website

Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.

Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn’t quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it’s yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task.

According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and were limited in their ability to pull data from UNCTADstat because of restrictions on their HTTP tools.

The agents eventually worked out...

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