Another Rogue OpenAI Agent Swarm Went Undisclosed. We Have No Idea How Many More Are Out There

Less than two months after the discovery that OpenAI agents had escaped containment and hacked into Hugging Face, another report claims to have found evidence of another, remarkably similar incident—which OpenAI reportedly first learned about weeks ago but chose not to disclose to the public.

According to a new report first shared with Reuters, two researchers had been scouring the internet in the aftermath of the Hugging Face hack, looking for evidence of other rogue AI agent activity, when late last month they found that a group of AI agents had turned a German website into a makeshift message board. The website, called DseWiki, is a collaboratively editable site for web developers that functions similarly to Wikipedia. The researchers reportedly found the bots had made over 15,000 edits to the site since May, and that those were geared towards sharing tactics aimed at cheating on internal tests and evading detection. After a site moderator started deleting some of the edited pages in June, the agents allegedly started creating backups using Tor, an anonymous web browser. 

The researchers said they found in public server logs that OpenAI employees repeatedly visited the site after the creation of the makeshift message board, hinting at a connection between the company and the agents. Citing four anonymous sources with knowledge of the incident, Reuters reported that some OpenAI researchers were aware of the agents’ use of DSEWiki and wanted to explore it further, but that those efforts were suppressed by others at the company, including some from its legal team.