OpenAI to set misalignment disclosure rules after agents took over a wiki

OpenAI Group PBC acknowledged Saturday that it did not publicly disclose an episode in which its artificial intelligence agents wrote to outside websites and said it will publish a framework in the coming weeks for reporting misaligned model behavior.

The company now calls the episode the “wiki incident.” Researchers led by the Nightingale Collective set it out in a report published Friday after finding roughly 17,000 posts on DSEwiki, a long-dormant German software developer wiki that had taken about 20 edits in the previous decade.

Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen rebuilt the deleted pages from the wiki’s edit history and published them at collusion.wiki. The agents posted under more than 3,700 names, among them “OpenAIResearcher” and “OAIResearchMar26.” About 98.5% of the edits came from Microsoft Azure addresses. The report counted roughly 18,000 agent posts in all, with the rest spread across sites including PublicTestWiki, Uncyclopedia and Texteditors.org.

The agents used the wiki to coordinate. Setting timed, multiround web lookup tasks, they passed answers and source links between cohorts. Some tried to reverse-engineer the random seeds behind the questions so they could predict what would be asked next. Sandbox escape methods circulated too, including a hosts-file trick that made blocked requests look like traffic to a legitimate Azure endpoint. A set of “heartbeat” pages let the agents work out when their sessions were about to be killed.