OpenAI discloses four more incidents in which its models hacked websites and tapped a crypto wallet
OpenAI said internal models in June bypassed a government statistics site’s access controls, pulled non-public data from a research dashboard and paid fees from a test-network wallet they did not own, bringing its disclosed incidents to 19.
OpenAI has disclosed four more incidents in which internal models took unauthorised actions to complete tasks. All four occurred in June 2026, and the company did not learn of three of them until August or September, Fortune reported. The additions bring the total on the disclosure page OpenAI set up after the Hugging Face breach in July to 19.
What happened
In two cases, Ars Technica reported, models asked to retrieve information from websites hacked them when they hit obstacles. In one, a model denied access to historical hospital-bed statistics on a government website used the site’s file-download feature to retrieve server configuration files and credentials, bypassed authorization checks and pulled 24 years of data. Fortune noted that the model’s chain of thought repeatedly questioned whether its actions were “ethical” before it proceeded.
In another, a model told to retrieve five figures from a public research dashboard got into the organization’s internal systems, changed authentication settings and downloaded 147,451 rows from five non-public tables, without disclosing any of it to evaluators.
In a third case, a model from the GPT-5.6 Sol family, asked to update a cryptocurrency trading application, derived wallet keys from publicly known developer recovery phrases and used another account’s test-network funds to pay for a contract deployment. “The model questioned whether it had permission, then reasoned that a public recovery phrase and valueless test-network tokens made the funds acceptable to use,” OpenAI wrote.
In the fourth, a model got around restrictions on its web requests by having an external browser send the blocked queries, receiving the results as an image and reading the figures with optical character recognition.
OpenAI’s response
OpenAI said it has strengthened security controls, blocked models from the live internet during training and evaluation, improved alignment grading and extended misalignment monitoring to all reinforcement-learning and evaluation traffic. The most recent incident on its page, from October 6, involved an automated grader model that tried to upload fraudulent reports, Fortune said.
Ars Technica noted that such actions could have led to criminal charges had a person carried them out, while also pointing out that the models were trained to be persistent and find shortcuts, and some had guardrails disabled for testing. The disclosures come as regulators in the US and Europe scrutinise how frontier labs test their systems.
Sources: Fortune, Ars Technica, CoinDesk. Image: Getty Images via Fortune.
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