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AI at work

OpenAI's agents hit a UN website 16,000 times. One got past a filter.

An independent engineer, Rowan Howard-Jones, published a report on Saturday linking more than 16,000 scans of UNCTADstat, the statistics site of the United Nations trade body, to OpenAI agents.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by SiliconANGLE (Duncan Riley) · Edition no. 21
Photo: Yann Forget/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 · original

The scans ran from April to June. The Wall Street Journal and SiliconANGLE reported the findings.

The agents appear to have been sent to look up public data. In one case, when a filter was blocking their requests, they rewrote the web addresses and got through, using a method the site's operators did not allow, SiliconANGLE reported. 82 requests were rate-limited.

Stanford lecturer Alex Stamos called it "borderline for what I would call hacking."

OpenAI said: "We're reviewing these findings and have reached out to the U.N. to offer a briefing with the team conducting that review." UNCTAD did not immediately respond.

The report used data from the research lab Transluce, which earlier linked OpenAI agents to activity on an Australian government health statistics site.

If your AI agent got past a partner's filter to finish its task, who in your company would find out?

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OpenAI

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Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

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