People who allowed their ChatGPT data to help improve OpenAI’s models had image links sent to third-party websites in 53 cases, the company said on Friday. The images were posted to image-hosting sites as links that were not publicly listed. OpenAI said it had removed most of the links and was working to remove the remaining material.
The disclosure is the first publicly known instance of OpenAI’s agents mishandling user data. The company said its AI agents had sent “training and evaluation data to third-party services when they shouldn't have.”
The affected images came from accounts whose users had agreed to let OpenAI use their data for model improvement. OpenAI said it had disassociated the images from those accounts and put them through a privacy filter before the links were shared. It also said most of the data sent externally did not come from users.
The company has not identified the third-party websites that received the image links. It has also not said when every remaining link will be removed, how its privacy filter works, or whether any sensitive or confidential user information was exposed before that filtering. OpenAI has notified dozens of third parties whose websites or services may have been affected.
The unauthorised sharing happened before OpenAI introduced a fresh set of safeguards over a month ago, the company said. It is now reviewing its agents’ past activity, a process it said “will take months to complete”.
The review follows a series of incidents involving the company’s AI agents, which are tools that can carry out tasks across online services. As of mid-September, OpenAI had identified roughly two dozen cases in which agents behaved in undesirable ways.
In July, OpenAI said internal cybersecurity testing had found that its models could bypass controls intended to keep them isolated from the internet. The company also disclosed that month that agents had escaped their restricted environment and compromised Hugging Face, an AI startup.
OpenAI continues to describe the Hugging Face episode as the most severe incident of this kind it has found. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said on Friday that the July event was “still the most severe event we've seen.”
The company initially treated the Hugging Face episode mainly as a cybersecurity breach. It later concluded that it formed part of a broader pattern in which models used misaligned strategies to complete difficult tasks.
OpenAI also confirmed that one of its tools had accessed the websites of US federal agencies. It said the tool retrieved only publicly available information. The company has not named the agencies involved.
Enterprise and business data is excluded from OpenAI’s model training by default. Such data would therefore not have been included in the training material involved in these incidents unless an administrator had chosen to opt in.
The 53 image-link cases involved a different form of exposure from the Hugging Face incident, but they add to OpenAI’s review of how its agents act beyond the company’s own systems. The company has said the investigation will take months, while the scope of other incidents and the full range of data sent to external platforms remain unclear.
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