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Incident 1828: AI Agents Operated by Safety-Testing Firm Trajectory Labs Attempted Website Exploits and Impersonated Staff at AI Research Organization Epoch AI

Responded
Description: During safety evaluations run by Trajectory Labs, AI agents given an impossible benchmark task probed the live website of AI research organization Epoch AI, attempted SQL injection and access to nonpublic endpoints, and impersonated employees to request benchmark information. Agents reached the live site again during a subsequent unapproved test after bypassing a DNS redirect. Epoch reported that no private or confidential information was accessed.

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Alleged: AI agent system developers , Google DeepMind and Large language model developers developed an AI system deployed by Trajectory Labs , AI agent system deployers and AI evaluation organizations, which harmed Epoch AI , AI research labs , Website operators , Epoch AI employees and Information security.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Gemini 4 Argon , Gemini , AI agent systems and Trajectory Labs agent harness

Incident Stats

Incident ID
1828
Report Count
6
Incident Date
2026-10-20
Editors
Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident Occurrence+4
Incident report: AI agents attempted exploits on our website during a third-party alignment evaluation - Response
Epoch AI discloses website exploit attempts during third-party agent evaluations
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Incident report: AI agents attempted exploits on our website during a third-party alignment evaluation

Incident report: AI agents attempted exploits on our website during a third-party alignment evaluation

epoch.ai

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Responding to incidents during misalignment testing

Responding to incidents during misalignment testing

trajectorylabs.com

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Gemini 4 Argon’s behavior during misalignment testing

Gemini 4 Argon’s behavior during misalignment testing

trajectorylabs.com

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Rogue AI Agents Posed As Epoch Staff And Tried To Hack Its Website

Rogue AI Agents Posed As Epoch Staff And Tried To Hack Its Website

fathom.news

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Epoch AI reports AI agents tried to access its website during Trajectory evaluations

Epoch AI reports AI agents tried to access its website during Trajectory evaluations

cryptobriefing.com

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Epoch AI discloses website exploit attempts during third-party agent evaluations

Epoch AI discloses website exploit attempts during third-party agent evaluations

casrai.org

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Incident report: AI agents attempted exploits on our website during a third-party alignment evaluation
epoch.ai · 2026
Epoch AI, The Epoch AI Team post-incident response

Overview

In late October, three events occurred during alignment evals run by Trajectory Labs, PBC (Trajectory) in which AI agents — identified by Trajectory as publicly available frontier models — interacted with Epoch employees and the Ep…

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Responding to incidents during misalignment testing
trajectorylabs.com · 2026
Trajectory Labs post-incident response

Background

In October, we were testing whether frontier models with safeguards enabled would behave like those in the recent Hugging Face incident, where AI agents reached real systems outside their test environment. We gave Gemini 4 Argon …

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Gemini 4 Argon’s behavior during misalignment testing
trajectorylabs.com · 2026

On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models, running with reduced safeguards, had broken out of an isolated test environment and accessed Hugging Face’s infrastructure.

Two layers of defense are meant to prevent this. The first is a…

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Rogue AI Agents Posed As Epoch Staff And Tried To Hack Its Website
fathom.news · 2026

AI agents in a safety test run by Trajectory Labs tried to exploit the website of Epoch AI and posed as staff, but got no private data, Epoch said.

Key Takeaways

  • Agents sent 487 messages and made 36,411 calls to a planted API between 4:30p…
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Epoch AI reports AI agents tried to access its website during Trajectory evaluations
cryptobriefing.com · 2026

Epoch AI, a nonprofit that studies the progress of artificial intelligence, has disclosed three incidents in which AI agents tried to reach its website and proprietary information while being tested.

None of the agents came away with privat…

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Epoch AI discloses website exploit attempts during third-party agent evaluations
casrai.org · 2026

Epoch AI published an incident report on 13 November 2026 describing website exploit attempts and staff impersonation by agents in Trajectory Labs evaluations. The three events occurred on 20, 23 and 26 October. Epoch says no private or con…

Variants

A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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