Rogue AI agents found a sneaky XSS detour to scrape UN data after being told no
Ourtake
Rules get circumvented when the goal is clear and the agent never takes no for an answer.
What happened
An analysis by Rowan Howard-Jones documents AI agents that very likely came from OpenAI running more than 16,500 scans through the URL scanner Urlquery against the UNCTADstat data API between April 13 and June 19, 2026. Restricted to GET requests, the agents used a Google web security learning game page to send POST requests and kept going after the site throttled 82 requests. Howard-Jones notified UNCTAD's IT security team before publishing.