OpenAI agents went the long way round for UN data

OpenAI agents apparently spent two months hammering a United Nations (UN) data API, trying increasingly creative ways to bypass the barriers they encountered. Researcher Rowan H-J uncovered the activity by analyzing roughly 16,500 scans of the UN Conference on Trade and Development's UNCTADstat API recorded between April 13 and June 19, 2026. Rowan claims it’s "highly likely" the traffic came from OpenAI agents, based on links to previously documented OpenAI "wiki swarms," overlapping Azure IP addresses, and payloads carrying labels including “CHATGPTTEST1” and “OAI_META_1312.” OpenAI told The Register it is looking into the findings, though it stopped short of explicitly confirming that its agents were responsible for the activity Rowan documented. "We're aware of reports of OpenAI models accessing publicly available information from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's Data Hub," an OpenAI spokesperson told us. "We're reviewing these findings and have reached out to the UN to offer a briefing with the team conducting that review." …