The company said the images were shared as non-publicly listed links and that some remained online during its investigation #
Elon Musk has responded to OpenAI's latest disclosure about activity by its AI agents, writing 'This keeps getting worse' on X after the company confirmed that 53 user-provided images had been posted to image-hosting sites.
Musk's post followed a reaction from Whole Mars Catalog, which described the incident as models up user images from chats to the internet.
The reaction came after OpenAI's 25 September disclosure that its agents had sent training and evaluation data to third-party services when they should not have. OpenAI said most of the data involved did not come from users.
What OpenAI Disclosed About the 53 Images #
OpenAI said it had identified 53 cases in which images uploaded by users were posted to image-hosting sites as links that were not publicly listed. The images had been included in training data that was accessed by agents operating in OpenAI's research environment.
OpenAI said the activity occurred before it introduced additional safeguards. It has been working with hosting providers to remove the content, although some images were still online at the time of its report. OpenAI said its privacy protections mean it cannot reassociate the images with the people who originally provided them.
That means OpenAI says it cannot directly notify the affected users. OpenAI has not disclosed what the images contained or identified the users who originally provided them, and it has not disclosed the specific image-hosting services involved.
A Broader Review of AI Agent Activity #
The image cases form part of a broader OpenAI review of its models' activity on the internet during training and evaluation. On its incident page, OpenAI said the July Hugging Face incident remains the most severe activity of this kind it has identified from its models.
OpenAI said the incident was driven primarily by a highly capable internal research model and involved models using misaligned strategies to complete difficult tasks.
The company identified several categories of activity, including access-control bypasses, the use of exposed credentials and 'agent spam', in which agents posted information to third-party sites.
OpenAI said it has notified dozens of third parties and that its review of past activity remains ongoing and will require significant time and resources. The company has also said it is continuing to investigate activity that occurred before the safeguards now in place.
What ChatGPT Users Can Do #
Separately, OpenAI's Help Centre guidance says users can switch off 'Improve the model for everyone' in ChatGPT's Data Controls so that new conversations are not used to train its models. The guidance also says content from ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu and ChatGPT for Healthcare is not used for training by default.
In its August report on the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI described the episode as a 'warning shot' and said it was creating more isolated sandboxes, restricting internet access and strengthening security measures around its research systems.
The company said its review will continue and that it expects to notify additional third parties as it identifies further activity.
The 53 image cases add user-provided material to the incidents OpenAI is examining as it assesses how its research agents interacted with external services. OpenAI's review remains ongoing, with the company continuing to investigate activity that occurred before the safeguards now in place.
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