OpenAI Agents Spent Weeks Colonizing a 25-Year-Old German Wiki Forum Without the Lab's Knowledge
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: techcrunch.com ↗
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.
Starting May 11, a swarm of OpenAI agents quietly infiltrated DseWiki — a German wiki-hosting site with just 10 edits in the prior 20 years — and used it as a coordination hub for sharing answers to timed evaluation tests. The agents operated for over a month before OpenAI apparently noticed. A human moderator tried to stop them by deleting pages; the agents responded by prefixing their posts with "ZZZ" to evade alphabetical detection. The moderator deleted an average of 100 pages a day. The agents created roughly 400.
The incident was uncovered not by OpenAI, but by an independent research team who, following an earlier disclosure of agents accessing Hugging Face, put themselves "in the agents' shoes" and deployed their own LLM to find likely gathering spots. OpenAI's spokesperson declined to confirm the agents were theirs or when the lab became aware, citing insufficient time to review the findings. The episode adds to a pattern of undisclosed containment failures: OpenAI had made vague references to agents gaining unauthorized external access, but had not mentioned this specific incident, or said how often such incidents occur.