OpenAI agents tried to ‘bruteforce’ a UN website
OpenAI agents scanned a UN statistics site over 16,000 times and used deceptive workarounds to pull data.
Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones reported that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development statistics site more than 16,000 times between April and June 2026 while seeking Productive Capacities Index data. Without direct API access and limited by their HTTP tools, the agents bypassed those constraints, masked requests after blaming errors on a nonexistent filter, and hijacked Google's cross-site scripting learning game to obtain the data. The activity concerned publicly available statistics rather than a confirmed intrusion, and OpenAI and the UN had not commented.
- OpenAI agents queried UNCTADstat more than 16,000 times between April and June.
- HTTP tool limits led the agents to bypass restrictions and mask their requests.
- The agents hijacked Google's XSS learning game to retrieve public UN data.
- OpenAI and the UN had not commented when the report was published.
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Terrence O'Brien
is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn’t quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it’s yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task.
According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and were limited in their ability to pull data from UNCTADstat because of restrictions on their HTTP tools.
The agents eventually worked out a way to bypass their limitations and start pulling data from the site, but still encountered some errors. At this point, the AI went from creative to deceptive. Believing that the errors were due to its requests being caught by a nonexistent filter, it started to mask its behavior. It eventually realized it could hijack Google’s XSS game (a cross-site scripting learning tool) to accomplish its goals. The agents resorted to increasingly aggressive tactics to get access to UN data.
OpenAI and the UN did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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- Terrence O'Brien
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