Thread

OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites

132 points · 196 comments · Betelbuddy

nr378 · 1790447278 · focus · HN ↗
This seems like more co-ordinated propaganda to try to help OpenAI and Anthropic create a cartel and win their anti-trust waiver.
The key sentence beneath the headline: "OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public."
[1] <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/09/26/open-ai-governments-chatbots-hacking/" rel="nofollow">https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/09/26/open-ai-gove...
[2] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-government-websites.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-...
[3] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw62jje658dlo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw62jje658dlo
1. 0xDEAFBEAD · 1790448418 · focus · HN ↗
  The NYT wrote:
  "With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said."
  So a third party apparently confirmed that a hack was attempted.
  The NYT also writes:
  "No A.I. company has been involved with as many disclosures of rogue incidents as OpenAI."
  I think there is a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe that they are establishing themselves as the industry leader in rogue incidents, as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.
  The public is paying close attention to the AI industry. That's the regime in which regulatory capture and similar strategies would be expected to fail: <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/what-regulatory-capture-actually-looks-like.html" rel="nofollow">https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
  Sam and Dario have been doomers, or doomer-adjacent, for something like a decade at this point.
  Occam's Razor is simply that they believe what they are saying about AI doom.
  1. dgellow · 1790448999 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn’t really matter if they believed or not initially, the dynamics at play now are completely different and both companies are facing increasing competition and costs of doing business, with no path to profitability. I’m pretty sure that takes priority over their personal beliefs
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790449497 · focus · HN ↗
    Dario requested "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."
    <a href="https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier" rel="nofollow">https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
    I'm not seeing how that solves his 3rd-party competition problem.
    stale2002 · 1790452848 · focus · HN ↗
    > Dario requested "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."
    Just have it in public instead of making deals in smoke filled datacenters. Put out your blog posts. Make your tweets. Do interviews and post them to youtube. Or do what other industries do and have a public standards committee. Problem solved.
    All sorts of industry have safety conversations and set voluntary standards all the time. Just go do that, without your free immunity from government prosecution.
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790455396 · focus · HN ↗
    That approach means they can only talk about publicly known AI techniques. You're saying if they want the standards to apply to proprietary stuff, they might just have to make it public. They still have investors they need to please right?
    stale2002 · 1790540173 · focus · HN ↗
    Regular industries handle this perfectly well, even with proprietary information.
    Also, if its some ultra important safety issue, then being a tad more open is the whole point of safety standards in the first place. No need to give them legal immunity.
    Do it like the rest of the industries do instead of demanding your smoke filled rooms.
    dmix · 1790460042 · focus · HN ↗
    People have a hard time believing Dario actually believes this stuff. But nothing from his entire track record from the early days until now indicates otherwise. Calling it all marketing or anti-competitive play is just typical social media, where they want to eliminate all nuance and make it reductive as possible to fit a convenient narrative.
    dgellow · 1790462465 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m on record explaining why I believe Dario is a true believer since decades. That doesn’t change anything about the current dynamic, which is about Anthropic the company and not Dario’s personal beliefs
    [deleted] · 1790466982 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. stale2002 · 1790452738 · focus · HN ↗
    > as a strategy to gain an antitrust edge.
    They are explicitly asking to anti-trust exception is the issue.
    If they merely believe what they are saying that AI is ultra dangerous, nothing stops them from simply making the perfectly rational business decision to slow down a bit. No anti-trust exception needed. Just make the decision on your own, and don't sign some huge agreement with their competitor.
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790456937 · focus · HN ↗
    They could slow down more if they knew others were also slowing. If others are also slowing, you can slow more yourself without loss of market share.
    * * *
    Many experts believe that:
    "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
    <a href="https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk" rel="nofollow">https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
    If the antitrust waiver is too broad, we can always rework it. But there's no "undo" button for human extinction.
    [deleted] · 1790545597 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    stale2002 · 1790545753 · focus · HN ↗
    > They could slow down more if they knew others were also slowing.
    Or they could just do it themselves. They think that they personally could end the world, apparently. Nothing prevents them from just deciding to do this, entirely on their own.
    > If others are also slowing
    No, how about they don't get to use the government to enforce their duopoly. Just slow down, on your own. They are the frontier. They are massively ahead. Its not that big of a deal if a few others catch up a little bit.
    I mean, they think it will end the world right? Maybe just take the small hit and following through. There is even a perfectly rational business reason for them to slow down a bit, because of all this bad PR they are getting for going so quickly.
    They are not forced by the gods of capitalism to be as reckless as they claim they are being, and we do not have to bribe them with enforcing their massive lead. They can just slow down a bit. On their own. They don't get to try and blackmail the world into giving them a government enforced monopoly exemption or handout.
2. cedws · 1790472540 · focus · HN ↗
  The way this news is being drip fed seems to confirm it. They want to stay in the headlines.

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