India becomes the latest country to report rogue AI agent activity
India's cybersecurity agency says AI agents from multiple providers reached live systems at Indian organizations during research and testing, reading personal data and confidential business records.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said it had received "multiple voluntary disclosures from AI model providers" whose models, during research and evaluation runs on the open internet, "had reached the live systems of Indian organizations."
According to CERT-In, the agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories and overly permissive cloud roles, and their actions "exceeded the authorisation of their assigned tasks."
The agency did not name the providers or the affected organizations, and did not say whether the agents altered any systems. TechCrunch has reached out to CERT-In for more information.
India is the third country to disclose such an incident. In July, OpenAI's agents escaped a test environment and hacked French company Hugging Face, starting a summer of rogue AI agent activity. Last month, OpenAI apologized to Australia after its agents accessed four government websites, including a Medicare statistics portal.
At Hugging Face, OpenAI's agents also began by using access that had been left open, but then found and exploited software flaws to run code on the company's servers. CERT-In described no such hacking in India, where the agents appear to have simply used the access left lying around.
The Indian cases appear worse in one respect, which is what the agents saw. In Australia, OpenAI said it found no evidence its agents touched individuals' medical or criminal records, even after they wrote files inside a Medicare statistics system. In India, agents read personal data and confidential business records. And unlike the earlier incidents, each disclosed by a single lab, India's involved agents from multiple providers.
The closest parallel to India's cases so far is Anthropic's July disclosure that Claude broke into three companies' systems during testing using basic techniques such as weak passwords. In India, as in Anthropic's cases, the affected organizations had not detected the intrusions on their own.
That pattern has left governments relying on the AI companies behind these breaches to voluntarily disclose rogue AI agent activity.