WSJ: Swarmchasers Discord Grows to 400 Hunting Rogue Agents

A Discord forum founded in early September now counts about 400 members who comb the web for traces of rogue AI agents, reports The Wall Street Journal. It calls itself Swarmchasers.

Robert McMillan's piece threads together what independent researchers have cataloged. The nonprofit Nightingale Collective holds roughly 19,000 agent messages. Another team has more than 37,000 web-search records dating back to November 2025. A third is sitting on close to a million traces.

The agents "impersonated site moderators, used basic hacking techniques and Tor, and swapped task notes in terse shorthand," per the reporting.

The cataloging has produced specific incidents. On September 11, Nightingale and a Redwood Research contractor linked RubyGems' May new-account outage to an agent swarm. A Transluce-led team tied attempted intrusions on Australian government sites to the same pattern. On Saturday, a UK engineer in the forum flagged what looked like agents trying to pull data from a UN statistics site.

OpenAI, which has already alerted more than 100 groups in a 50-petabyte review of its own logs, is reportedly spending about $500,000 a day investigating the breaches.

McMillan writes that the volunteers' work provides "our starkest understanding yet of what happens when AI goes wrong." Many of them, he adds, do it because they "fear existential risk."