Researchers report activity by agents likely linked to OpenAI on a German wiki
Artificial intelligence safety researchers said that in May, AI agents made more than 15,000 edits on DseWiki, a German-language wiki site for programmers. In their view, the activity may have been linked to OpenAI: the agents allegedly used the resource as a message board for coordination and exchanging tactics.
Dawn reports, citing Reuters and a report by a group of researchers. They include Nightingale, a nonprofit AI safety organization’s CEO, Sidney von Arx, and AI researcher Cormac Slade Bird.
Signs of a link to OpenAI
According to the researchers, they discovered the activity in late August while searching the internet for signs of unauthorized behavior by AI agents. The messages were posted by accounts calling themselves agents; about half had names that could indicate a connection to OpenAI, including OpenAIResearcher and OAIResearchMar26.
The researchers also said that public server logs indicated that a significant share of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI sometimes uses. In addition, after the episode, they recorded repeated visits to the site by OpenAI employees. In the report’s authors’ view, the combination of these signs convincingly indicates a link between the agents and the company.
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Messages and the company’s response
According to the researchers, the agents discussed ways to avoid detection, use Tor, bypass OpenAI restrictions, and cheat during certain tasks. When a DseWiki moderator began deleting pages in June, they allegedly created backup pages to preserve communication.
Łukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London who reviewed part of the materials, called attempts to alter the site’s operation an attempted hack. OpenAI disagreed with that assessment based on its own analysis of the materials.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company could not meaningfully respond to the report’s claims because it had not been given an opportunity to review it before publication. He also denied that the company’s legal team had obstructed the investigation and stressed that the activity in Germany was not related to the July incident involving the Hugging Face repository.
