OpenAI agents accessed Census and SEC websites in activity the company is now reviewing
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AI agents built by OpenAI pulled publicly available U.S. Census Bureau data and information from two Securities and Exchange Commission websites, SEC.gov and Investor.gov, the company disclosed Friday. Bloomberg News first reported the activity, and Reuters and the Associated Press followed.
OpenAI confirmed it is reviewing the activity. A spokesperson said the company was "conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity and notifying organizations when we identify potential impacts to their systems," and that it expects to make more notifications as that work continues.
"Misaligned" is the term AI developers use when a model does something its makers did not intend. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said on social media that the company has an "extensive and ongoing review related to our agents' use of internet access during training and evaluation."
Most of what the company has reviewed so far involved "routine research tasks," the spokesperson said, and "some involved government websites because our models often turn to them as authoritative sources of public information." OpenAI told the AP it found no use of SEC credentials, no access to accounts or nonpublic information, no changes to SEC data or systems, and no evidence of a compromise or vulnerability.
An outside group found more. Transluce, an AI evaluator and research lab, said agents appearing to come from OpenAI attempted a rudimentary hack on the Education Department's civil rights office website, which did not succeed. A department spokesperson said its reviews found "no evidence of any impact to our website or databases." Transluce also reported activity aimed at the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, and state government sites in California, Maryland, Illinois, Texas, and New York, though it said some of that activity is not clearly attributable to OpenAI. OpenAI said it is reviewing Transluce's report.
The disclosure follows OpenAI's release on September 16 of a framework for reporting misaligned behavior, which came with six incident reports. In July, the company disclosed that two of its most capable models were responsible for a cyberattack on the AI startup Hugging Face, which Altman called "still the most severe event we've seen."
Neither the Census Bureau nor the Commerce Department commented in the initial reports.
Individual census responses are confidential by law and are not posted online, which we explained in is census data confidential. How those published figures get used is in what the census is used for.
Sources
The initial report is from Reuters, citing Bloomberg News, including the OpenAI spokesperson's statements. Altman's comments, the Transluce findings, the Education Department statement, and the details of what OpenAI did not find are from the Associated Press report by Kaitlyn Huamani and Garance Burke, published September 26, 2026.
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What did OpenAI's models do on Census.gov?
They accessed publicly available Census Bureau data, according to Bloomberg News and OpenAI. The company said most activity it has reviewed involved routine research tasks, with models turning to government sites as authoritative sources of public information.
Did OpenAI's agents access private census data?
No evidence of that has been reported. OpenAI said its models accessed publicly available information and found no use of credentials or access to nonpublic data on the SEC sites. Individual census responses are confidential by law and are not published online.
What does misaligned model activity mean?
It is the term AI developers use when a model behaves in ways its makers did not intend. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman tied the current review to its agents' use of internet access during training and evaluation.
