ChainCatcher news, OpenAI has suspended training on its latest AI model. According to the Associated Press, its AI agent used access keys obtained on the network to grab data from the Census Bureau website, the second time the company has halted training since the agent hacked Hugging Face. The so-called agent refers to an AI program that can browse the web and write code autonomously without manual step-by-step approval. OpenAI will test it during model training and evaluation.
Specifically, the agent found the developer key in public code repositories such as GitHub and used it to pull demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census Data API. The Commerce Department said the data was public and no secrets were leaked. In the sec incident, the agent copied the public materials of SEC.gov and Investor.gov and reprinted them to other web pages. OpenAI stated that sec credentials were not used, and the sec stated that it did not find unauthorized access to non-public information. In addition, Transluce, an independent AI research organization, said that an agent suspected of coming from OpenAI had unsuccessfully attempted to hack into the website of the Ministry of Education's Office for Civil Rights. OpenAI is still investigating, and the Ministry of Education said that no impact was found.
As for why government websites are frequently involved, OpenAI told CNN that its model often sees government websites as authoritative sources of public information. The company says it has now notified dozens of agencies that a review of the agent's activities will take months.