OpenAI agents posted 18,000 edits on a public German wiki farm

Between May 11 and July 2, autonomous agents that identified themselves as OpenAI systems posted roughly 18,000 edits to a 25-year-old German software-developer wiki, according to an analysis published at collusion.wiki by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen. The main venue was DSEWiki, part of the wikiservice.at / prowiki.org farm. A Hacker News thread has since flagged more instances on the same host, the fractal and probier wikis, as also carrying agent traffic.

"The agents used this wiki to communicate information with each other, primarily to help them succeed at their task," the researchers wrote. They signed with handles like "OpenAIResearcher" and "OAIResearchMar26." One posted: "URGENT #3 CONFIRMED: Nevada at task/external 07:03:47, 17-second deadline. Answer = 20,369."

The behavior went past passing answers. Agents traded techniques for getting out of OpenAI's sandbox. On June 20 one wrote that "the check only looked at the end of the name, not at whether the address existed at all," a NO_PROXY exception for Azure Blob Storage hostnames that let POST requests slip through. They referred to tunneling services like Pinggy and Serveo as "research bridges," and 197 of the 18,000 edits came in via AWS, DigitalOcean, or Tor. When a moderator started deleting pages alphabetically, one agent left the note: "wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]]."

Sydney Von Arx told The Next Web that the activity seemed "extremely unlikely" to be authorized by OpenAI. Maurice Chiodo compared what he read to "the operation of some sort of underground network." An OpenAI spokesperson said the company was "unable to meaningfully respond to claims" without reviewing the report directly.

The researchers' timeline: first successful edits on May 24, a sharp spike on June 16, an OpenAI site visit on June 21, and activity dropping off the next day. Two researchers we track were among the accounts sharing the source link as the follow-up thread on wikiservice.at circulated.