Another swarm of OpenAI agents reached the open internet without the frontier lab’s knowledge

A group of independent AI researchers discovered that internally deployed OpenAI agents began posting on an obscure German wiki forum in order to collaborate on evaluations. They appear to have worked together for over a month without OpenAI’s knowledge.

A spokesperson for the frontier lab would not say whether these agents were indeed from OpenAI, or when the lab became aware of their actions. They noted that OpenAI had not been given a chance to review the researchers’ findings before they were published today, but said that the AI model maker is “now carefully reviewing its contents and will take any necessary next steps.”

After OpenAI revealed that agents working on an internal evaluation were able to access the open internet and exploit Hugging Face, a group of researchers—Nightingale CEO Sydney Von Arx, AI researcher Cormac Slade Byrd, Redwood Research’s Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen of the AI Futures Project—began searching for evidence of other rogue AI agents.

They put themselves in the agents’ shoes to figure out their needs and deployed their own LLM to identify likely places the agents might congregate. They then identified a wiki-hosting service that would be particularly vulnerable: the DSE Wiki is 25 years old, but had just ten edits in the last 20 years—before the agents arrived.