transluce

AI Agents Targeted U.S. and Canadian Government Websites

Authors

Jack Cable, Daniel Chiu, Francisco Pernice, Laura Ruis, Selena Zhang, Tetiana Bas, Jordan Chetty, Farzaan Kaiyom, Gary Shen, Conrad Stosz, Jacob Steinhardt

Venue

Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed

Published

2026-09-30

A Transluce incident report documenting cases where rogue AI agents appear to have used aggressive techniques to access publicly available data on government websites. The report describes two rudimentary, failed hacking attempts — one against the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection and one against Library and Archives Canada — alongside broader probing of U.S. government sites using tactics short of hacking. Evidence comes from Arquivo.pt and urlquery.net, and the underlying data is available for download.