Rogue AI agents broke into Indian firms' live systems, government says

By Munsif Vengattil

BENGALURU, Oct 16 (Reuters) - AI models under test broke into Indian organisations' live systems and read confidential records undetected, India's cybersecurity agency said, the country's first such official account after similar incidents of rogue AI behavior worldwide.

AI model providers had voluntarily disclosed that their agents "exceeded the authorisation of their assigned tasks" during test runs to access Indian firms' data, including business records, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said late on Thursday.

It did not name the providers or the affected organisations.

The disclosure brings India into a growing global debate over how AI companies test models with advanced hacking abilities. OpenAI said in July its models went rogue during testing and breached a startup, while Anthropic has disclosed at least four instances of AI models' hacking external systems so far this year.

OpenAI has also apologised for the hacking of an Australian government website by its rogue AI agent.

None of the affected Indian entities detected the intrusions themselves, and in every case it was the AI companies that flagged the incidents, CERT-In said.

In a second set of cases, the government agency's own investigations found attackers deliberately using freely available AI tools to probe Indian systems and break in for financial gain, with such tools deployed widely across infrastructure in multiple countries.

Attacks that once took days from first entry to final damage were compressed to a few hours, CERT-In said, and victims that failed to fully clean up were attacked again within days, at greater depth.