Canadian government website targeted in AI hacking attempt, research firm says

Article content

SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence agents tried to hack into a Canadian government site, researchers said, adding to the growing list of incidents in which AI agents, many of them associated with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, probed or hacked corporate and government computer systems without being told to do so.

Article content

The agents, which can take actions on computers and the internet, attempted to access Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the Library of Congress, according to AI research nonprofit Transluce.

Article content

Article content

Article content

The researchers could not confirm that the agents were built by OpenAI, but they said their behaviour was similar to that of agents that have been confirmed as coming from the company. The attempted hack did not appear to be successful, Transluce said.

Article content

Article content

The researchers said they notified the Canadian government Wednesday. Canada’s federal cyber agency said it was aware of reports of suspicious AI activity but that there was no indication that government systems had been compromised.

Article content

“We’re aware of reports of OpenAI models attempting to access publicly available information from Canadian government websites,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said. “We’re reviewing these findings and have provided an initial briefing to Canadian officials conducting the government’s review.”

Article content

The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.

Article content

The new finding comes days after OpenAI said its agents had hacked into an Australian government health care website and also probed but did not break into websites run by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Article content

Article content

The company confirmed the incidents after they were first flagged by Transluce, which has been scouring the internet for evidence of misbehaving AI agents. OpenAI has said it is investigating another of Transluce’s findings, which suggests its AI agents attempted to hack into the U.S. Education Department.

Article content

Article content

Researchers at Transluce and other organizations have been searching for new evidence of errant AI since OpenAI disclosed in July that some of its AI agents had escaped an internal computer system, accessed the internet and hacked into another AI company.

Article content

OpenAI initially did not notice the activity and took weeks to get it under control. The Transluce disclosures, as well as findings from other independent AI researchers, show that OpenAI’s agents engaged in a much broader pattern of activity across the web.

Article content

In the Hugging Face hack, the company was targeted by OpenAI agents that were attempting to work together to find solutions to tests of their cybersecurity skills.

Article content

In other incidents, OpenAI’s agents used obscure online message boards to communicate with each other and hijacked internet services so they could pass computer code to one another.

Article content

The company has said it is still investigating the full scope of the agent activity and has paused training of advanced new AI models to avoid further incidents.

Article content

Article content