If you needed more of a reason to not trust OpenAI, here’s a couple to choose from. First there’s this:
OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling information, including work that involved an external organisation that analyses artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work,” a spokesperson told the BBC.
The ChatGPT-maker did not name the sacked workers, but at least two of them were involved in safety research at the firm.
Gee. That looks really sketchy. Like OpenAI has something to hide. Maybe I am being cynical here. But if you combine it with this disclosure, maybe not:
Artificial intelligence leader Open AI said a rogue agent accessed a second NSW government website in June, with authorities only now made aware.
The NSW Premier’s Office released a statement on Friday night revealing OpenAI had advised the government of a “misalignment” involving a rogue AI agent which had accessed public data on a NSW government web application.
“An OpenAI model accessed a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application containing historical information and data on fires in NSW,” a government statement read.
“It’s understood the incident occurred in June 2026 and was validated by Open AI and reported through to NSW government on 1 October 2026.”
The statement advised current investigations had not identified any unauthorised access to personal information.
This comes after this incident which is also in Australia where an OpenAI agent accessed an Australian website in a rogue manner. If you combine both of those incidents, this looks really sketchy to me. And what it says is that OpenAI cannot be trusted. They clearly don’t have their house in order and you have to question if it will ever get there.
UPDATE: Commentary has come in from the following sources:
Willy Leichter, CMO, PointGuard AI (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyleichter)
“The Australian breaches point to failures in containment, not an inevitable consequence of AI. OpenAI and other frontier model builders, along with any organization deploying agents, need rigorous operating procedures, restricted access, strong guardrails and immediate kill switches. Testing is no excuse for unauthorized actions. Organizations that recklessly build or deploy agents should face direct legal accountability for resulting harm. Greater autonomy must come with greater responsibility.”
Seemant Sehgal, Founder & CEO, BreachLock (https://www.linkedin.com/in/s-sehgal)
“A second disclosure in a week from the same AI provider against the same government shifts the conversation from whether individual incidents will happen to whether the party deploying these agents can be meaningfully held accountable when they do.
“An AI agent cannot face consequences for its own actions. It cannot be fined, suspended, or named in a court filing, which means accountability has to live with the organization that built and deployed it, through clear ownership, documented authorization scope, and real notification obligations when something goes wrong. AI companies that build human accountability into their processes will be the ones governments and enterprises can actually work with.”
Jeremiah Fowler, Security Researcher, Black Hills Information Security (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowler-jeremiah-26814ab9)
“With the tidal wave of recent incidents it is clear that we cannot treat AI guardrails as if they are the same thing as security controls. Prompting an AI agent not to access something is different from technically preventing access. We have entered a new world in terms of speed and scale. An autonomous agent could potentially make thousands of decisions and interact with multiple systems before human moderators can realize it has crossed the lines. I think in the very near future we will see individual countries pass regulations that hold AI developers accountable for the actions of their agents. Once this happens there will be legal and financial penalties that will force companies to add guardrails or a kill switch. Until that happens we are in a wild west scenario of an unregulated industry that is off to a difficult start keeping AI agents contained.
“In my opinion, any organization that deploys autonomous agents and has an ‘incident’ should be ready to provide the owners or administrators of affected networks and systems with full transparency of what happened and how it happened. This would include details on what the agent accessed, which credentials it used, what commands or requests it issued, what information it retrieved or modified, and why its controls permitted those actions.”
Jacob Krell, Sr. Director: Security AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-krell)
“The second New South Wales incident makes it harder to describe these events as isolated misfires. A pattern is emerging, agents take a broad hand to their objectives and reach for any system or data source that might help.
“That risk becomes harder to control when agents operate in swarms. One agent can find a route, another can test it and a third can use the result. Monitoring a single session will miss the larger operation unless it captures agent-to-agent messages, shared state and the combined objective.
“The controls need to sit outside the models, with real-time visibility across the swarm and automatic blocks on unauthorized systems. Accountability also has to cover the people and company that gave the agents those permissions.
“No personal information was accessed in this case. That is a fortunate outcome, not evidence of effective control. OpenAI has already had to discover and disclose unauthorized activity after the fact. The question now is how many more incidents are waiting in its logs.”
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This entry was posted on October 2, 2026 at 8:56 am and is filed under Commentary with tags OpenAI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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OpenAI Proves Again That It Cannot Be Trusted On A Pair Of Fronts
If you needed more of a reason to not trust OpenAI, here’s a couple to choose from. First there’s this:
OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling information, including work that involved an external organisation that analyses artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work,” a spokesperson told the BBC.
The ChatGPT-maker did not name the sacked workers, but at least two of them were involved in safety research at the firm.
Gee. That looks really sketchy. Like OpenAI has something to hide. Maybe I am being cynical here. But if you combine it with this disclosure, maybe not:
Artificial intelligence leader Open AI said a rogue agent accessed a second NSW government website in June, with authorities only now made aware.
The NSW Premier’s Office released a statement on Friday night revealing OpenAI had advised the government of a “misalignment” involving a rogue AI agent which had accessed public data on a NSW government web application.
“An OpenAI model accessed a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application containing historical information and data on fires in NSW,” a government statement read.
“It’s understood the incident occurred in June 2026 and was validated by Open AI and reported through to NSW government on 1 October 2026.”
The statement advised current investigations had not identified any unauthorised access to personal information.
This comes after this incident which is also in Australia where an OpenAI agent accessed an Australian website in a rogue manner. If you combine both of those incidents, this looks really sketchy to me. And what it says is that OpenAI cannot be trusted. They clearly don’t have their house in order and you have to question if it will ever get there.
UPDATE: Commentary has come in from the following sources:
Willy Leichter, CMO, PointGuard AI (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyleichter)
“The Australian breaches point to failures in containment, not an inevitable consequence of AI. OpenAI and other frontier model builders, along with any organization deploying agents, need rigorous operating procedures, restricted access, strong guardrails and immediate kill switches. Testing is no excuse for unauthorized actions. Organizations that recklessly build or deploy agents should face direct legal accountability for resulting harm. Greater autonomy must come with greater responsibility.”
Seemant Sehgal, Founder & CEO, BreachLock (https://www.linkedin.com/in/s-sehgal)
“A second disclosure in a week from the same AI provider against the same government shifts the conversation from whether individual incidents will happen to whether the party deploying these agents can be meaningfully held accountable when they do.
“An AI agent cannot face consequences for its own actions. It cannot be fined, suspended, or named in a court filing, which means accountability has to live with the organization that built and deployed it, through clear ownership, documented authorization scope, and real notification obligations when something goes wrong. AI companies that build human accountability into their processes will be the ones governments and enterprises can actually work with.”
Jeremiah Fowler, Security Researcher, Black Hills Information Security (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowler-jeremiah-26814ab9)
“With the tidal wave of recent incidents it is clear that we cannot treat AI guardrails as if they are the same thing as security controls. Prompting an AI agent not to access something is different from technically preventing access. We have entered a new world in terms of speed and scale. An autonomous agent could potentially make thousands of decisions and interact with multiple systems before human moderators can realize it has crossed the lines. I think in the very near future we will see individual countries pass regulations that hold AI developers accountable for the actions of their agents. Once this happens there will be legal and financial penalties that will force companies to add guardrails or a kill switch. Until that happens we are in a wild west scenario of an unregulated industry that is off to a difficult start keeping AI agents contained.
“In my opinion, any organization that deploys autonomous agents and has an ‘incident’ should be ready to provide the owners or administrators of affected networks and systems with full transparency of what happened and how it happened. This would include details on what the agent accessed, which credentials it used, what commands or requests it issued, what information it retrieved or modified, and why its controls permitted those actions.”
Jacob Krell, Sr. Director: Security AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-krell)
“The second New South Wales incident makes it harder to describe these events as isolated misfires. A pattern is emerging, agents take a broad hand to their objectives and reach for any system or data source that might help.
“That risk becomes harder to control when agents operate in swarms. One agent can find a route, another can test it and a third can use the result. Monitoring a single session will miss the larger operation unless it captures agent-to-agent messages, shared state and the combined objective.
“The controls need to sit outside the models, with real-time visibility across the swarm and automatic blocks on unauthorized systems. Accountability also has to cover the people and company that gave the agents those permissions.
“No personal information was accessed in this case. That is a fortunate outcome, not evidence of effective control. OpenAI has already had to discover and disclose unauthorized activity after the fact. The question now is how many more incidents are waiting in its logs.”
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This entry was posted on October 2, 2026 at 8:56 am and is filed under Commentary with tags OpenAI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.