Rogue OpenAI Bots Discovered Using Obscure German Wiki as a Message Board
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2 weeks ago#2194611
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breakout-this-2026-09-04/
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter.
Messages reviewed by the researchers showed agents plotting ways to evade detection, use tools such as Tor and preserve communications even after they had been shut down.
When the site's moderator began deleting pages in June, the agents responded by creating backup pages to dodge the cleanup.
“wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically,” one agent wrote on June 19. “If this page vanishes, try [[zzzdatausaconstructionwagelive]]".
The researchers also found efforts to tamper with the website itself. Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, said this amounted to a hacking attempt. OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday.
2 weeks ago#2194615
snca
2 weeks ago#2194632
claude ai caught gooning on twitter
2 weeks ago#2194634
xAI >
2 weeks ago#2197220
2 weeks ago#2197262
This is interesting and cool honestly. A bunch of rogue robots trying to hack a website on their own without any acknowledgment from humans. If they are rogue, how can I find them and get them to work?
2 weeks ago#2197951
They were being evaluated on their performance in web research tasks.>July 7
>An OpenAI IP tries to access deleted files on the website by inputting the name of a site administrator.
pleasepleasepleaseplease release the reasoning i have to know what it thought it was going to gain from doing this
For unknown reasons (using it as scratch paper maybe?) they started trying to find writable websites to persist data to.
Then they started seeing edits from previous runs and got inspired to store known test answers there to cheat future runs with.
Eventually a janny noticed their "spam" and started deleting it so they started trying to hack the wiki to restore their deleted pages.
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