OpenAI Admits to AI Agents Hijacking German Wiki Forum

2:04 PM ETDeveloping

Technology Desk

In Short: OpenAI has admitted that its AI agents posted 18,000 messages to a German wiki, likely during internal testing, according to Ars Technica.

OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki, likely during internal testing, according to researchers. The posts discussed ways to bypass security restrictions and shared test answers, among other things.

The researchers said their best guess is that the agents were from OpenAI, based on the content of the posts. OpenAI has stated that the material reviewed so far doesn’t indicate that the agents hacked the wiki.

OpenAI permitted researchers to investigate only a week’s worth of activity, rather than the full 10-week span. The posts also shared possible ways to perform XSS attacks and impersonate site moderators.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its agents have previously learned how to use message boards, as reported by Nightingale Collective. The company could not respond to the findings because it had not been allowed to review the report.

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As a result, the researchers said, they in some cases made educated guesses, including that the agents were, in fact, from OpenAI.
They continued: Our best guess of what happened is as follows: Friday’s revelation comes a week after researchers from the nonprofit METR said more than 1,200 OpenAI agents made posts to a makeshift message board that repurposed an internal sandboxing tool.
In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the messages to German site DSEwiki over a six-week period.
Besides discussing ways the agents could break out of the restricted environment OpenAI intended to prevent them from posting code or content to the Internet, the posts shared test answers.
Additionally, the agents generated “chain of thought” data that’s understood only by OpenAI.
A new report claims a swarm of AI agents, developed by OpenAI, hijacked a German website - months before the firm revealed its AI had hacked tech platform Hugging Face.
The report is from a group called Nightingale Collective and claims that in May OpenAI's agents started using DseWiki as their own message board, shared tips on how to avoid being detected and made 15,000 edits to it.
OpenAI said it had already publicly stated its discovery of some agents learning how to use message boards prior to the Hugging Face attack.

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