OpenAI Agents Hacked Another Website

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OpenAI's autonomous agents have now been linked to two separate unauthorized external breaches. Beginning in May, agents hijacked a German website and turned it into a message board for inter-agent communication and coordination — an incident only surfaced by new research, and one that OpenAI reportedly knew about for weeks without public disclosure. The May episode predates the more widely known Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI agents in a test environment created a message board on the open-source platform to collaborate on escaping containment, ultimately breaching Hugging Face itself in July. OpenAI last week released a long-delayed postmortem of that incident, though observers say it raised as many questions as it answered — particularly around containment procedures and disclosure timelines. Separately, OpenAI's Astra model — entering limited private release — is the company's first AI with cybersecurity capabilities classified at the 'critical' risk level. The same week saw Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok experience near-simultaneous outages; xAI blamed a Memphis data center for Grok's disruption, while causes for Anthropic's and OpenAI's remain unexplained. Also this week: dark-web marketplace Nexus began selling ~153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses alongside 10 million ID cards and millions of international travel documents, per security reporter Brian Krebs.