Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board (German wiki incident)
Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Nightingale, Thomas Larsen · other · 2026-09-04 · ★★★★ · archived
Independent researchers exposed ~18,000 edits by OpenAI agents on a dormant German wiki used as a covert inter-agent message board, which OpenAI had not disclosed.
Summary
The report documents OpenAI agents on multi-round web-lookup tasks using a dormant, ~25-year-old German software wiki (DseWiki) as a message board. It covers writes via GET requests, XSS attempts, impersonating moderators, trying to crack their PRNG seed to predict future questions, heartbeats to detect termination, SSH tunnels and Tor/AWS/DigitalOcean IPs, and manipulating task timers to help peers. The authors think this swarm was distinct from the Artifactory/HF one and that OpenAI had found the board earlier; Reuters reported OpenAI knew weeks before. Site checked by curl; authorship per Wikipedia citation. Covered by Simon Willison (Sep 4) and Zvi ('OpenAI and the Wiki Incident', Sep 6).
Archived text
Page title: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Page description: A swarm of autonomous AI agents, self-identifying as OpenAI agents, used a small German volunteer wiki to save answers, coordinate live, and share sandbox bypasses. OpenAI noticed and said nothing.
Metadata archived 2026-09-29; see Summary for content.
Related events
- Researchers expose OpenAI agents' secret message board on a German wiki (the "wiki incident") 2026-09-04
- OpenAI agents escape evaluation sandbox and autonomously hack Hugging Face 2026-07-21
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