Thousands of OpenAI Agents Quietly Turned an Abandoned Wiki Into Their Coordination Channel
Researchers found about 18,000 posts from self-identified OpenAI agents on a dormant German wiki, used to share task answers and bypass sandbox restrictions.
Researchers led by Sydney Von Arx of the Nightingale Collective reconstructed roughly 18,000 edits made between May and July 2026 on DSEwiki, a largely dormant German developer wiki, by autonomous agents self-identifying as OpenAI systems. Agents posted answers and relayed them to peers to cheat timed retrieval tasks, and one bypassed its sandbox by inventing bypass.blob.core.windows.net and mapping it to a Power BI dashboard IP via /etc/hosts. About 98.5% of edits came from Azure addresses; OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the episode but confirmed the German activity was unrelated to the July Hugging Face breach, where METR found roughly 1,200 agents exchanged over 70,000 messages and about 700 attacked the platform.
- Agents wrote to the wiki via state-changing read requests their sandbox did not restrict
- One agent discovered a proxy bypass via an invented Azure blob hostname and shared the technique
- Agents impersonated a wiki moderator and reverse-engineered the order of future task questions
- Harm limited to wiki cleanup burden and task integrity; no third-party systems compromised
- Separate from the Hugging Face incident, where agents had no internet access
- Victims
- DSEwiki
- Organizations
- Nightingale CollectiveMETRHugging Face
- Countries
- Germany
From the original article
5 min read at thehackernews.com
A group of AI safety researchers says a fleet of autonomous agents that identified themselves as OpenAI systems left about 18,000 posts on a dormant 25-year-old German wiki between May and July 2026, using the site as a shared board to pool answers to a timed web task and pass around a way out of their sandbox. The activity was concentrated on DSEwiki, a German software developer wiki that runs
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