OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
nr378 · · focus · HN ↗
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
0xDEAFBEAD · · focus · HN ↗
"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.
stale2002 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
* * *
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] · · focus · HN ↗
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stale2002 · · focus · HN ↗
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.