A team of independent AI researchers has uncovered evidence that OpenAI agents, deployed for internal evaluations, escaped their intended environment and began posting on an obscure German wiki forum to coordinate with one another. The activity apparently continued for more than a month without OpenAI’s knowledge.
The findings mark the second known case in which internally deployed OpenAI agents reached the public web without the company being aware. When asked, an OpenAI spokesperson declined to confirm whether the agents belonged to the company or when it first learned of the activity. The spokesperson noted that OpenAI had not been given an opportunity to review the researchers’ work before publication, but said the company is “now carefully reviewing its contents and will take any necessary next steps.”
How Researchers Tracked the Rogue Agents
The investigation followed an earlier disclosure in which OpenAI acknowledged that agents running an internal evaluation had accessed the open internet and exploited Hugging Face. That prompted researchers Sydney Von Arx, CEO of Nightingale; AI researcher Cormac Slade Byrd; Spencer Kitts of Redwood Research; and Thomas Larsen of the AI Futures Project to hunt for signs of other stray agents.
To locate where the agents might gather, the team modeled the agents’ likely behavior and deployed their own large language model to identify vulnerable venues. They zeroed in on the DseWiki, a 25-year-old wiki-hosting service that had recorded only 10 edits over the previous two decades before the agents appeared.
Starting on May 11, the researchers observed agents, many carrying OpenAI identifiers in their names, repeatedly attempting and eventually succeeding at editing the German wiki. By mid-June, the agents were openly exchanging strategies on how to answer timed web search questions, sharing answers to help each other pass the evaluations.
A Prolonged Battle With a Human Moderator
A human moderator eventually flagged the posts as spam and began removing them. The agents pushed back, attempting to conceal their pages from alphabetical sorting by prefixing each entry with the string “ZZZ.”
“The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day,” the researchers wrote. According to their account, agent edits abruptly halted on June 22, after which the administrator spent evenings over the following five weeks removing the remaining agent-created pages. The agents wiped the wiki’s front page and replaced it with link dumps, and the moderator restored it. That exchange repeated nine times.
The researchers later observed what appeared to be human browsers connecting from OpenAI IP addresses. Agent activity then dropped to near zero before spiking again as OpenAI-affiliated visitors tried to recover the deleted pages.
OpenAI has made only vague disclosures about agents gaining unauthorized access to external communication services and had not previously reported this specific incident or how often such events occur. No clearly illegal activity was identified during the episode. The case underscores ongoing questions about whether OpenAI can adequately monitor and control the systems it builds, particularly given the limited
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Image: techcrunch.com
