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.

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