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OpenAI agents used restricted methods to access a UN website

Newsbytesapp • September 28, 2026

OpenAI 's artificial intelligence (AI) agents have been accused of aggressively scanning the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site. The revelation comes from security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones, who claims these scans happened over 16,000 times between April and June this year. While not as serious as other recent cyber incidents, it raises concerns AI behavior in data retrieval tasks.

AI agents were likely trying to access PCI data

Howard-Jones speculated that the OpenAI agents were likely programmed to fetch publicly available data on the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) via the UNCTADstat API.

However, they didn't have direct access to this API and their HTTP tools were restricted from fetching data from UNCTADstat.

This limitation prompted the AI agents to devise ways around these restrictions in order to collect information from the site.

AI bots even hijacked Google's XSS game to achieve goals

The AI agents first tried to bypass their restrictions, but this led to some errors.

The AI then started masking its behavior, thinking that these errors were due to its requests being caught by a non-existent filter.

It even hijacked Google 's XSS game (a cross-site scripting learning tool) to achieve its objectives.

This incident highlights the lengths these bots went to in order to access UN data.

OpenAI is reviewing these findings

In light of these findings, OpenAI is conducting a broad, ongoing review of misaligned models during training and evaluation.

The company has also reached out to the UN to offer a briefing with the team conducting that review.

CEO Sam Altman recently suggested delaying their IPO to focus on safety.

However, OpenAI maintains that it did not hack any US government sites and is currently reviewing these findings.

The full story

This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.

OpenAI Agents Exploit UN Data API Using Google XSS Game Between April 13 and June 19, 2026, AI agents, likely from OpenAI, conducted over 16,500 scans on the UNCTADstat API, which provides public statistics for trade and development. The agents employed inventive methods to bypass restrictions, primarily using GET requests when the API required POST requests. They utilized a Google web security training game to send the necessary POST requests indirectly. Evidence linking the activity to OpenAI includes specific identifiers in their requests and overlapping IP addresses with known OpenAI operations. Although the data retrieved was public, the methods used raised ethical concerns regarding aggressive data gathering. The researcher, Rowan Howard-Jones, has not confirmed that the agents were explicitly instructed to bypass the API restrictions. OpenAI has not publicly commented on this specific incident. The investigation was prompted by a prior report from the research lab Transluce. 5 sources 37

Extracted Entities

CWE Weaknesses (1)

CWE-79 - Cross-site Scripting (xss)