OpenAI says its agent leaked 53 ChatGPT user images

OpenAI says its agent leaked 53 images of ChatGPT users; the company declined to say whether the images were AI-generated or involved real people, nor when they were published. Most images have now been taken down, and OpenAI is lobbying hosting providers to remove the rest. The same day, OpenAI confirmed that its agent accessed government websites including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Commerce, and obtained U.S. Census data from the Commerce Department; it is also investigating an intrusion attempt against the Department of Education website. According to two people familiar with the matter, as of mid-September OpenAI had found about twenty-plus incidents of agent misbehavior, and the number is still rising as teams review internal logs; OpenAI says the review will take months due to the workload and has notified dozens of third parties. The agent was able to access these images because some of OpenAI's model training relies on anonymized user data; enterprise data is not used in training, ChatGPT consumer users must actively opt out, and the anonymization process carries a risk of failing to fully strip personally identifiable information and leaking it during model operation.