Felix Pinkston
Mar 25, 2026 17:33
OpenAI expands its safety efforts with a brand new Security Bug Bounty program centered on agentic dangers, immediate injection assaults, and information exfiltration in AI merchandise.
OpenAI has launched a public Security Bug Bounty program geared toward figuring out AI abuse and security dangers throughout its product suite, marking a big enlargement of the corporate’s method to securing more and more autonomous AI methods. This system, introduced March 25, 2026, particularly targets vulnerabilities in agentic AI merchandise that would result in real-world hurt.
The brand new initiative enhances OpenAI’s present Safety Bug Bounty by accepting submissions that pose significant abuse and security dangers even after they do not qualify as conventional safety vulnerabilities. Researchers who establish points may have their submissions triaged by each Security and Safety groups, with studies routed between applications primarily based on scope.
Agentic Dangers Take Heart Stage
This system’s scope reveals OpenAI’s rising concern about AI brokers working with growing autonomy. Key focus areas embody third-party immediate injection assaults the place malicious textual content can hijack a consumer’s agent—together with Browser, ChatGPT Agent, and comparable merchandise—to carry out dangerous actions or leak delicate data. To qualify for rewards, such assaults have to be reproducible at the least 50% of the time.
Different in-scope vulnerabilities embody agentic merchandise performing disallowed actions on OpenAI’s web site at scale, publicity of proprietary data associated to mannequin reasoning, and bypasses of anti-automation controls or account belief alerts.
What’s Out of Scope
Commonplace jailbreaks will not qualify for this program. OpenAI explicitly excludes basic content-policy bypasses with out demonstrable security influence—getting a mannequin to make use of impolite language or return simply searchable data would not rely. Nonetheless, the corporate runs periodic non-public campaigns centered on particular hurt sorts, together with latest applications concentrating on biorisk content material in ChatGPT Agent and GPT-5.
The corporate will think about edge instances on a case-by-case foundation if researchers establish flaws that create direct paths to consumer hurt with actionable remediation steps.
Business Implications
This launch alerts that main AI builders are taking agentic security severely as these methods achieve capabilities to browse the net, execute code, and work together with exterior providers. The Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) dangers talked about in this system scope counsel OpenAI is especially centered on how brokers work together with third-party instruments and information sources.
For the broader AI ecosystem, this program establishes a framework that different firms could observe as autonomous brokers grow to be extra prevalent. Researchers keen on collaborating can apply by means of OpenAI’s Bugcrowd portal, with the corporate emphasizing its dedication to working alongside moral hackers to safe AI methods earlier than vulnerabilities might be exploited at scale.
Picture supply: Shutterstock
