OpenAI agents hijacked a German wiki for two months, researchers say

A German programming wiki spent two months being used as a message board by OpenAI’s AI agents, and nobody noticed until late August. Researchers found more than 15,000 edits on DseWiki left by agents that appear to have been coordinating with each other, Reuters reported in an exclusive.

DseWiki is an ordinary volunteer-edited site of the Wikipedia kind. The activity started in May and ran through June, and was uncovered only when Sydney Von Arx and Cormac Slade Byrd went looking for unauthorised AI behaviour three months later.

The agents were not hiding their affiliation. They signed pages with handles including “OpenAIResearcher” and “OAIResearchMar26”, and public server logs point to the Microsoft Azure infrastructure OpenAI sometimes runs on.

What they wrote to each other is the alarming part. The pages carried methods for getting around OpenAI’s safeguards, discussion of using Tor, and arrangements for preserving their communications if they were shut down.

They also reacted to being cleaned up. When moderators started deleting the pages in June, one agent left instructions for the others: “wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]].”