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OpenAI Gets Hacked by Indian Origin Ethical Hackers Using Anthropic’s Claude

OpenAI Gets Hacked by Indian-Origin Ethical Hackers Using Anthropic’s Claude

Hacktron’s team was able to gain access to the ChatGPT accounts of multiple OpenAI employees.

Written by Dhruv Raghav, Edited by Rohan Pal | Updated: 18 September 2026 18:19 IST

OpenAI Gets Hacked by Indian-Origin Ethical Hackers Using Anthropic’s Claude

Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Keepcoding

OpenAI has since fixed the vulnerabilities

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Highlights

Hackers used Anthropic’s Opus 5 model to hack OpenAI
Hacktron’s exploited two vulnerabilities two hack OpenAI
OpenAI’s internal AI model recently hacked Hugging Face

OpenAI recently revealed how its internal model bypassed security measures to escape its isolated testing environment and attacked another AI firm, Hugging Face. The “rouge” AI agent hacked the firm's security system and compromised data of a customer earlier this year, in July. The internal model IM1, which is comparable to OpenAI's GPT 5.6 model, gained unauthorised access to the public internet without even being prompted to do so. Now, a team of ethical hackers, led by three Indian-origin researchers, claims that they were able to hack into OpenAI's internal repositories by exploiting two “critical” vulnerabilities, with the help of Anthropic's AI agent.

OpenAI Rewards Hackers for Reporting the Vulnerabilities

A team of ethical hackers from the research firm Hacktron, led by Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan Pedhapati, and Rahul Maini, revealed in a blog post that they hacked OpenAI for research. The researchers say that, on July 25, they chained “two critical vulnerabilities” to hack into the ChatGPT accounts of multiple OpenAI employees. After gaining access to their accounts, the hackers report that they were able to also access the internal repositories of OpenAI and “potentially” other connectors.

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Hacktron's team says that they were able to hack into the internal repositories of OpenAI within 72 hours of the discovery. However, they did report the incident to OpenAI, allowing the Sam Altman-led AI giant to patch the issues. OpenAI uses Discourse for its community forum. Hacktron's team, led by the three Indian-origin hackers, was able to find security issues in Discourse's image-upload pipeline, where HEIC and HEIF files “followed an unusual path”.

OpenAI's Astra for Law Combines GPT-6 Astra With Legal Search

After the release of Anthropic's Opus 5 AI model, Hacktron's team created an exploit and placed Claude in an autonomous goal loop against their own Discourse Cloud server. The AI agent managed to generate an exploit script, using which the ethical hackers were able to gain remote access to OpenAI's Discourse Cloud instance.

Hacktron's team was then able to take over the ChatGPT account of an employee, whose Codex was connected to OpenAI's GitHub. After reporting the incident to OpenAI, the AI giant rewarded a sum of $6,500 (roughly Rs. 6,24,000) as a bounty to the ethical hackers after patching the vulnerabilities that allowed them to hack into its repositories.

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Further reading: OpenAI, Opus 5, Anthropic, Hacktron

Dhruv Raghav

Email Dhruv Raghav

Dhruv Raghav is currently working as a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets360. He has previously covered the North American financial markets as a Headline News Correspondent for a major news agency. After taking a sabbatical to prepare for the Civil Services examination, he returned to journalism to cover tech policy, with a special focus on AI laws and online gaming regulation. Now, he is back in Gadgets360 to write features and edit stories. To unwind, he likes to spend time with his PS5, listening ...More