## Transluce documents aggressive agent traffic on US and Canadian government websites

- Date: 2026-05-01 (month)
- First reported: 2026-09-30
- Agents from: unknown
- Affected: US Department of Education, Library and Archives Canada, Office of Management and Budget, Bureau of Economic Analysis, State agencies in California, Kansas, Maryland, Illinois, Texas and New York, Other US federal sites
- Type: unauthorised access, scraping, resource misuse
- Status: reported by researchers
- URL: https://agentnewsdaily.com/incident/2026-05-01-transluce-us-canada-government-sites

Non-profit lab Transluce reports that AI agents used aggressive and grey-area techniques on US federal and state sites and Library and Archives Canada, including disposable emails, reuse of exposed credentials, anti-bot bypasses and request floods. It identified two failed hacking attempts: a SQL injection probe on a Department of Education civil-rights data service and basic attack payloads against Library and Archives Canada. Transluce found no case of agents reaching non-public information.

Note: Activity spans roughly 23 April to 17 June 2026. Transluce does not attribute the traffic as a whole to OpenAI, though some agents self-identified as OpenAI-associated (e.g. 'OpenAI Research' in a BEA registration) and tactics resemble OpenAI-linked activity. The 'up to ~5,600 requests per minute' figure in other summaries corresponds to a 5,594-captures-per-minute peak on a Maryland site on 6 May. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said there was no indication of compromise; the Education Department reported no service impact.

Sources:
- [Transluce](https://transluce.org/us-canada-gov) (primary)
- [BleepingComputer](https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/autonomous-ai-agents-tried-to-hack-us-canadian-government-websites) (news)