A report by independent researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says agents “highly likely” to have been operated by OpenAI made more than 16,000 scans of UNCTADstat, a statistics platform run by the United Nations. The reported activity took place between April 13 and June 19, 2026.
The report describes requests for employment data and other economic statistics. It says the agents tried to locate endpoints and retrieve data by testing UNCTADstat API fields when straightforward requests failed. The agents also appeared to try alternative names after access attempts failed with a supplied key.
According to the report, the agents opened URLs in a sandboxed browser through Urlquery to make requests they apparently could not send directly from their own environments. Their processes were also observed being repaired and refined over time to improve efficiency.
Labels including CHATGPTTEST1 and OAI_META_1312, along with a connection to FractalWiki, a public wiki previously associated with OpenAI activity, were cited as evidence. However, OpenAI’s responsibility for the traffic has not been confirmed.
An OpenAI spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the company was reviewing the findings and had offered the United Nations a briefing with the review team. The report says the API keys were publicly exposed and the sought information was public; the activity was not deemed a hack.
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