Researcher says OpenAI agents made 16,000 requests to UNCTAD — The Verge

Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones said that OpenAI agents scanned the statistical website of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) more than 16,000 times between April and June. The Verge reports.

Obtaining statistical data

According to Howard-Jones's assessment, the agents were likely tasked with obtaining publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. At the same time, he said, the agents did not have direct access to the API and were limited in their ability to obtain data from UNCTADstat due to restrictions of their HTTP tools.

Later, the agents found a way to bypass these restrictions and began retrieving data from the website, but they still encountered errors. As the publication writes, the system assumed that its requests were being intercepted by a filter that did not actually exist, after which it began masking its behavior.

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Google tool

Eventually, the agents found that they could use Google XSS Game, a training tool for learning cross-site scripting, to achieve their goal. The Verge notes that the agents resorted to increasingly aggressive methods in an attempt to access UN data.

OpenAI and the UN did not promptly comment on the publication's request.