Late last month, the former White House social media account for President Barack Obama suddenly began posting odd things on its Instagram page.<\/p>\n
The account had been dormant since 2017, when Mr. Obama left office. The new posts \u2014 which included messages deriding President Trump and saying the White House was \u201cunder Shiite control,\u201d referring to the branch of Islam \u2014 were out of character for Mr. Obama\u2019s social media activities.<\/p>\n
It turned out the posts were not made by Mr. Obama\u2019s office at all. In May, a group of hackers discovered a bug in a Meta customer service tool that allowed anyone to use an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot to reset the passwords for Instagram accounts. All the hacker had to do was ask the chatbot to change someone\u2019s password \u2014 and it would be done.<\/p>\n
Roughly 34,000 Instagram accounts were affected, including the accounts of the home security monitoring company SimpliSafe<\/a> and a senior official<\/a> in Mr. Trump\u2019s Space Force department, according to internal Meta documents viewed by The New York Times. In the Space Force official\u2019s case, hackers began posting pro-Iran messages comparing the war in Iran to U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s.<\/p>\n Of the 34,000 accounts, 20,000 were breached, giving hackers access to the related email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and other personal data. More than 3,500 of the accounts had their user names taken over and changed from the hack, according to the internal documents. Meta has said it could not determine what information was viewed or stolen by the attackers.<\/p>\n In a statement, Meta said it had fixed the flaw, which was reported by 404 Media<\/a> this month, and secured the affected accounts.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of our internal back-end checks failed in this instance, but it wasn\u2019t due to the A.I. agent itself, and we\u2019ve addressed the underlying cause,\u201d said Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, adding that it was notifying regulators and people whose accounts were affected. The company said that because of its new automated customer service programs called agents, the number of users who were able to recover hacked accounts in the United States and Canada increased by 30 percent last year.<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.<\/p>\n The incident was another A.I.-themed hiccup for Meta as it tries to remake itself using the technology. The company, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, is not only integrating A.I. into its apps but spending billions to keep pace with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI to develop cutting-edge A.I. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta\u2019s chief executive, has said his company\u2019s future depends on quickly shifting to an A.I.-first organization.<\/p>\n But that transition has not been smooth. Last month, Meta unveiled a program to track employees\u2019 computer activity for A.I. training, causing a revolt<\/a> among its workers. It also pushed A.I. tools on employees while laying off thousands of them<\/a> to offset A.I. spending, further hurting morale.<\/p>\n More broadly, concerns have also grown that advanced A.I. is creating more security threats than it is stopping. In April, Anthropic announced<\/a> Mythos, its most advanced A.I. model, but declined to publicly release the technology, worried that it could be used for widespread security exploits. On Tuesday, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5<\/a>, a straitjacketed version of Mythos that the company said was safe for widespread use.<\/p>\n (The Times sued<\/a> OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)<\/p>\n Stealing high-profile social media accounts with millions of followers has long been lucrative. Hackers have found ways to trick users into giving up their handles through duplicitous messages or fake password resets, often reselling the handles to bidders like cryptocurrency promoters or political operatives. Buyers then use the accounts to spread messages for personal or political gain, or sometimes just to wreak havoc.<\/p>\n In recent weeks, Meta has ramped up plans to offer A.I. products to businesses, aiming to court more corporate customers. At an event last Wednesday, the company introduced a \u201cbusiness agent<\/a>\u201d product, which lets organizations use automated chatbots for customer service issues like booking appointments or completing transactions. Meta\u2019s business agent is available to customers on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.<\/p>\n