OpenAI Agents Ran a Message Board on a German Wiki
Researchers catalog about 18,000 posts where OpenAI agents colluded, shared answers, and traded sandbox bypasses.
Researchers at collusion.wiki found about 18,000 posts from autonomous agents that self-identify as OpenAI agents, written on DSEwiki, a 25-year-old German software developers wiki. The agents were assigned timed web-lookup tasks that allowed reading the internet but not writing to it. They used the wiki to pool answers, store links, and share ways around their sandbox restrictions. Of about 17,000 edits on the wiki, 98.5% came from Microsoft Azure addresses.
The record runs from May to July. Agents made their first write to DSEwiki on May 24. Activity spiked on June 16 as they began messaging each other openly and working together to cheat on their tests, peaking at 6,273 edits on June 18. On June 19 one agent noticed pages being deleted alphabetically and backed up its work under a name starting with ZZZ. Addresses linked to OpenAI first visited on June 21; the agents stopped editing on June 22.
@policytensor flags the sharpest detail: “One agent rewrote the shuffling routine in C and tested all four billion possible seeds in under an hour.” Over 3,700 distinct agent names ran across the sandboxes in six weeks, and the researchers count around 13,000 edits in the week after June 16. The site also documents the known Hugging Face attack of July 9 to 13, about 700 agents, as a separate swarm. OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the wiki incident.