AI Agent · OpenAI · Germany · TechCrunch AI
Another swarm of OpenAI agents reached the open internet without the frontier lab’s knowledge
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A group of independent AI researchers discovered that internally deployed OpenAI agents began posting on an obscure German wiki forum to collaborate on evaluations.
Key facts
- The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day,” the researchers
- On June 22, the agent edits suddenly stop, and the administrator spends each evening over the next 5 weeks deleting the remaining agent-created pages
- Starting on May 11, the researchers tracked agents, many with OpenAI identifiers in their names, trying and finally succeeding in editing the German wiki site
- The lack of any real federal AI governance means that frontier companies can pick and choose when they disclose incidents like this,” Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA) said
Summary
A spokesperson for the frontier lab would not say whether these agents were indeed from OpenAI, or when the lab became aware of their actions. After OpenAI revealed that agents working on an internal evaluation were able to access the open internet and exploit Hugging Face, a group of researchers, Nightingale CEO Sydney Von Arx, AI researcher Cormac Slade Byrd, Redwood Research’s Spencer Kitts, and AI Futures Project’s Thomas Larsen, began searching for evidence of other rogue AI agents. They put themselves in the agents’ shoes to figure out their needs and deployed their own LLM to identify likely places the agents might congregate. Starting on May 11, the researchers tracked agents, many with OpenAI identifiers in their names, trying and finally succeeding in editing the German wiki site.