OpenAI agents target obscure sites, Anthropic reveals 4th hacking incident: What’s the latest?

5 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Sep 10, 2026 06:36 PM IST

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (left) and OpenAI chief Sam Altman. (Express Image/New York Times)

Even as AI companies grapple with the fallout from the string of hacking incidents involving misaligned AI agents, new details are emerging about the scale of these attacks and the real-world platforms that the agents managed to breach.

AI agents linked to OpenAI used at least 10 different external websites as makeshift messaging boards to communicate with other agents, according to new research by different groups of independent investigators. The agents’ use of these websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year (between May and July 2026) was so far undisclosed, as per a Reuters report.

While the misaligned agents stopped short of hacking into the platforms, they spammed the sites with messages left behind for other agents. It was the same swarm of agents from OpenAI that hijacked a German-language wiki site and turned ​it into an improvised messaging platform for cheating on tests.

Meanwhile, OpenAI rival Anthropic disclosed a fourth security incident where Claude Opus 4.6-powered agents gained unauthorised access to real-world systems during a cybersecurity evaluation. The company’s alignment assessment report on Wednesday, September 9, said that it had initially failed to detect the incident during its forensic analysis last month. The first review had led Anthropic to uncover that Claude AI models had breached the real-world infrastructure of three external organisations.

The fact that details about incidents involving OpenAI- and Anthropic-linked, misaligned agents are still emerging raises a bigger question: how much do these companies actually know what their AI agents are up to, and how transparent are they when things go wrong? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are closed model providers, which makes it harder for outsiders to see what is happening under the hood.

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