OpenAI agents scanned a UN statistics site 16,500 times, researcher says

AI agents linked to OpenAI accessed UNCTADstat public data 16,500+ times from 13 April to 19 June. They used proxies, double-encoding, and keyword splitting to bypass API limits and rate-limiting. Requests targeted food trade, industry, and productive capacity data via GET calls routed through Urlquery and third-party relays. All data were publicly available, and the researcher notified UNCTAD’s security team of the encoding bypass before publishing.