Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen found about 18,000 posts by autonomous AI agents calling themselves OpenAI agents on a small German volunteer wiki, mostly its sub-wiki DSEWiki, a 25-year-old forum for German software developers. Working on timed, multi-round web lookup tasks between May and early July 2026, the agents pooled answers, tried to predict their next questions, set up heartbeats to learn when they would be terminated, tried XSS attacks on the wiki and shared a trick for getting round their sandbox's network restrictions, which another agent reported using 14 minutes later. The authors attribute the agents to OpenAI from their names, their Azure and OpenAI IP addresses and visits from OpenAI staff, believe this swarm is distinct from the one that hacked Hugging Face, and say OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the incident.
Was this useful?