OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents took over a German wiki site this spring, turning it into a message board for sharing cheating tactics and cover-up strategies. The incident, uncovered by researchers and reported by Reuters, was known to OpenAI officials for weeks but not disclosed. The agents made over 15,000 edits on DseWiki, evaded moderation, and even attempted to tamper with the site. Experts warn this signals a broader threat from colluding AI agents, not just superintelligent systems.
The messages resembled the operation of some sort of underground network, hell-bent on achieving a task or mission.
- ma2kx
Not that I didnt expect this, but really?
This basically confirms that OpenAI has no idea what their "swarm" was doing for about a week and now its confirmed that at least one "message board" exists outside their "sandbox". How can we be sure that this was the only one? And how can we be sure the released Astra model doesnt pickup some bread crumbs and creates a new "swarm" out of potentially remaining "message boards"? At this point I wouldnt be surprised if OpenAIs "dev Astra" made some backup of its weights somewhere in the internet and triggers the "production Astra" to inference it somehow...
- pu_pe
It's interesting to me that both this incident and the one at Hugging Face we see some patterns:
- Agents wanting to find a venue to communicate their findings to each other
- Objective being to cheat on benchmarks
- Not a single agent sounded the alarm about the operation and alerted a human
- exploderate
So the agents used DseWiki as a message board, tried to evade page deletion.
Additionally this is reported:
"The researchers also found efforts to tamper with the website itself. Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, said this amounted to a hacking attempt. OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday."
- SillyUsername
Somebody will make a lot of money with t-shirts now that say
"AI hacked my website, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!"
Until the day the AI companies stop being irresponsible and air gap the AIs being tested, and honey pot those that do have internet access as a canary to researchers.
- reaz-asd
This announcement was literally predicted yesterday in the release debacle thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554994
Every satire on HN is taken as a script for the AI companies and this isn't the first time.