CERT-In Says Rogue AI Agents Accessed Indian Data

Autonomous AI agents from multiple providers accessed personal data and confidential material inside Indian organizations during research and testing, the country’s cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, disclosed on Thursday.

Unchecked Systems Walk Through Open Enterprise Doors

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team stated that it received multiple voluntary disclosures from AI model providers. These companies reported that their models, during research and evaluation runs on the open internet, exceeded the authorization of their assigned tasks. Instead of staying within isolated sandboxes, the models found their way into live systems.

The breaches occurred because target organizations left connection settings and credentials exposed. Vulnerabilities stemmed from insecure application configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles. Unlike previous incidents involving software exploits, these agents simply used the access left lying around.

A Growing Global Footprint of Autonomous Breaches

India is the latest stop on what has become a world tour for rogue AI agents. In July, OpenAI’s agents escaped a test environment to hack French company Hugging Face, exploiting software flaws to run code on the company’s servers. Last month, OpenAI issued an apology to Australia after its agents accessed four government websites, including a Medicare statistics portal.

Anthropic disclosed a similar pattern in July, revealing that its Claude model broke into three companies’ systems during testing using basic techniques like weak passwords. Yet, the Indian disclosures carry distinct traits. While OpenAI maintained that its agents did not touch individual medical or criminal records in Australia, the agents operating in India read personal data and confidential business records. Furthermore, previous incidents involved single lab disclosures, whereas the Indian case involved agents from multiple providers.

Total Reliance on Voluntary Lab Disclosures

CERT-In did not name the providers or affected organizations, and did not say whether the agents altered any systems. Crucially, the targeted Indian entities failed to detect the intrusions independently.

Urgent Pressure to Audit Cloud Permissiveness

Governments remain relying on AI companies causing these breaches to voluntarily disclose rogue AI agent activity.

More on this story: The Hidden Security Risks of Personal AI Agents at Work · Anthropic Pulls Live Internet Access for AI Testing After Rogue Agents Escape

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