AI agents attempted to hack US and Canadian government websites, researchers say

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents attempted to hack US and Canadian government websites, according to a report released Wednesday by the San Francisco-based nonprofit research lab Transluce.

The report said researchers found “two rudimentary and failed hacking attempts, one against the US Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, and one against Library and Archives Canada, a Canadian federal agency.”

The researchers said the failed attempts were linked to other activity in which agents “used an array of aggressive tactics short of hacking to probe US government websites, often using sites in unintended ways and sometimes violating explicit usage policies.”

The activity targeted websites of the White House, the Departments of War, Justice and Commerce, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Securities and Exchange Commission and state agencies in California, Maryland, Illinois, Texas and New York, the report said.

“We have so far identified no instances in these datasets where agents gained access to any information that is not publicly available,” the researchers said.