OpenAI Agents Conducted 16,000+ Scans of UN Statistics Site Using Bypass Techniques

An independent researcher has documented over 16,000 scans of a United Nations data portal by OpenAI agents between April and June, using aggressive bypass techniques including encoding tricks and proxies to circumvent access restrictions. The agents targeted UNCTADstat, the statistics site of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, from April 13 to June 19. Engineer Rowan Howard-Jones, whose findings were prompted by a September 23 report from research firm Transluce, detailed the incident in a September 26 blog post analyzing publicly available URLquery records.