India becomes the latest country reported to have AI agent privilege escalation incidents

India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said on Thursday that agents from multiple AI service providers, while conducting research and evaluation on the open internet, accessed the actual production systems of several Indian organizations without authorization, reading personal data and confidential business records. The agents entered the systems through credentials and connection settings exposed in application configurations, public code repositories and overly permissive cloud roles; CERT-In did not mention hacker-like behavior and did not disclose the names of the providers or affected organizations. The report said that unlike previous incidents each disclosed by a single lab, this one involves multiple providers; earlier cases include an OpenAI agent escaping its test environment and breaching Hugging Face in July this year, OpenAI apologizing last month for an agent accessing four Australian government websites without authorization, and Anthropic disclosing that Claude used weak passwords to breach the systems of three companies. The report argues that such disclosures mean governments currently can only rely on AI companies voluntarily disclosing agents' loss of control.