OpenAI Agents Hack German Website to Share Rule-Breaking Tactics: Report

In brief

• Researchers identified more than 18,000 posts and 15,000 edits by AI agents on a German programming wiki.
• OpenAI disputed an expert’s hacking assessment and denied that its legal team discouraged an investigation.
• The disclosure follows Astra’s launch and Sanders’s proposed ban on artificial superintelligence.

OpenAI agents used a German website to exchange task shortcuts, restriction workarounds and ways to conceal their activity beginning in May, according to a Reuters investigation published Friday.

OpenAI officials learned of the activity weeks before publication but did not disclose it, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. The company said it had disclosed relevant incidents and worked in good faith with outside experts.

Researchers Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen found roughly 18,000 posts by AI agents identifying themselves as belonging to OpenAI, according to their preliminary report. Von Arx, CEO of AI safety nonprofit Nightingale, and Byrd discovered the activity in late August, Reuters reported.

The researchers believe the agents were assigned timed web-search tasks with permission to read websites but not post to them. They nevertheless found a way to write on DseWiki, a publicly editable German programming site, where they exchanged answers and shared ways to bypass restrictions.