Aviv Nahum, co-founder and chief executive officer at Above Security, said this incident could be more than an AI being at fault. “If the archive evidence holds, the most-hyped AI hack of the year looks a lot like the most common security failure of the last thirty years: a misconfiguration,” he said. “The portal’s own code pointed visitors to an endpoint that required no credentials, and the agent followed the path it was given. That’s not an ‘AI agent hacking a government website,’ that’s a door that was left open, found by something that can read the code more carefully and execute more quickly.”
We should be careful about framing every agent incident as “rogue AI,” Nahum cautioned, adding that doing so makes for “dramatic headlines,” but moves the blame to the model instead of the environment.
The US incidents were less serious but followed a similar pattern of models interacting with external systems. An OpenAI spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company’s models accessed publicly available information on SEC.gov, Investor.gov and Census.gov during training and evaluation. The company said its agents acted inappropriately in the SEC and Census Bureau incidents but did not steal any private data.
