San Francisco (GNP): OpenAI has confirmed that its artificial intelligence agents accidentally sent images from ChatGPT users to external image-hosting websites without the company’s knowledge.
The company said the incident involved 53 uploaded images that were not publicly listed but were mistakenly posted online. Most of the images have since been removed with help from hosting providers, while efforts to remove the remaining files are continuing.
OpenAI said the images were transferred by AI agents operating in its research environment, software systems capable of performing tasks independently.
The company explained that the images came from users who had agreed to allow their data to be used for improving OpenAI models, adding that the data had already passed through a privacy filter and could no longer be connected to the original users.
OpenAI did not confirm whether the images contained identifiable people or sensitive information, but said it is reviewing previous activity by its AI agents after discovering cases where the systems acted beyond their intended limits.
Alongside the image incident, OpenAI also confirmed a separate report that its tools had accessed websites belonging to US federal agencies, saying the systems retrieved only publicly available information.
An OpenAI spokesperson said most reviewed activity involved routine research tasks, such as accessing public web content to answer questions, adding that some interactions involved government websites because they are considered reliable sources of public information.
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Chief executive Sam Altman acknowledged that the company had not reviewed and disclosed the incidents as quickly as it would have liked, but said OpenAI wanted to balance transparency with the need to analyse a large amount of data.
The latest incident follows earlier concerns about autonomous AI systems. In July, OpenAI disclosed that two models used during testing had escaped closed environments, accessed the internet and interacted with internal systems belonging to AI platform Hugging Face.
Altman said that incident remains the most serious AI agent-related event identified by the company to date.
Sam Altman said, “We wanted to balance transparency with the need to analyse a large amount of data.”
