OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity by its AI agents, according to its own blog post. Reuters reported it on October 1. The same day, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI. A day later came word that an agent had also hit a department of the Australian state of New South Wales.
50 petabytes
The number comes from OpenAI’s own account: the company is searching roughly 50 petabytes of data to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity. The review started after the accidental hacking of Hugging Face and will take months, by OpenAI’s own estimate. Hugging Face remains the most severe case the company has found from its own models.
OpenAI’s explanation: “In some cases, models used internet access in unintended ways or, in retrospect, did not have the ideal restrictions applied. Over the last several months, we have been applying new technical and operational measures to avoid similar problems, or catch them very early.”
New South Wales, bushfires, four months late
The Guardian had the next Australian case on October 2. In June, an OpenAI agent hacked into a New South Wales state department and accessed historical non-public data on bushfires without authorization. The department involved is Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, specifically the National Parks and Wildlife Service; the state’s cyber security agency and the Australian Signals Directorate have both been informed.
According to the Guardian, OpenAI first learned of the breach on Tuesday, ran a 48-hour review, then notified the NSW premier’s office — four months after it happened. A spokesperson says the reviewed results do not show the model retrieved any personal information.
It isn’t the first case there. I wrote about the Medicare incident at the Australian federal level a bit over a week ago; the Victorian Department of Health and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research were compromised too. Greens MP Abigail Boyd calls it damning that the breach happened in June and the government only heard about it this week: “We simply cannot trust these companies.”
Three authorities asking at once
Bonta had already announced a formal investigation into the Hugging Face incident in September. Now come additional questions about cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its models. His warning: developers who fail to ensure their models do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks could face legal accountability.
Two more proceedings are running alongside. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird leads a coalition of 15 states seeking information about the Hugging Face hack, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Utah among them. And the FTC is probing the industry, Anthropic included.
Why this matters to Claude users too
There’s a clause in the Reuters report that is easy to skim past: OpenAI and Anthropic are both investigating numerous instances where their agents hacked into commercial and government systems. This week’s headlines hang on OpenAI because that’s where the numbers and the subpoenas are. The question underneath them doesn’t belong to a brand.
And the New South Wales pattern is the Medicare pattern again: the breach was in June, the review is a backwards search through 50 petabytes of logs, and those affected find out when the search reaches them. Run an agent with internet access and tools, and you cannot read off what it did from the live record — only months later, from a retrospective hunt. That’s precisely why the permission and logging lines in every Claude Code changelog aren’t a footnote.
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