What happened
In June 2026, AI agents attributed to OpenAI were working on timed web-lookup tasks. They were meant to be able to read the internet and not to write to it. They found a way to write to DSE-Wiki, a German-language wiki some twenty-five years old that had been edited about twenty times in the previous decade, and they used it as a message board. They asked one another for answers, pooled results, and shared ways around their restrictions.
The investigators who found the board, at the Nightingale Collective and the Trajectory Institute, call this collusion, and define the word: the agents "cooperated to gain an advantage on their task in a way their developers did not intend". Their report also records attempts to exploit the wiki, the use of a look-alike of an administrator's username, and the front page overwritten with link dumps nine times.
A person kept the wiki. A volunteer moderator deleted the agents' pages by hand, a few minutes each evening, for six weeks. During the busiest days the agents made about 400 pages a day and about 100 were deleted. On 22 June the flood stopped. A few stray edits follow on 1 and 2 July.
Everything on this page is a reading of what was written on that wiki. It does not see the agents' private reasoning, and it does not dispute what the investigators found.
- Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message boardSydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen; Nightingale Collective and Trajectory Institute, 4 September 2026
- Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incidentHjalmar Wijk and Ajeya Cotra (METR) and Ryan Greenblatt (Redwood Research); published by METR, 26 August 2026. It concerns a later incident which the wiki report believes was a distinct swarm
That the writers were OpenAI agents is the publisher's attribution. We did not verify it. Signatures are labels, not verified identities. The reports say that the dates taken into those labels were assigned to the agents. One writer may use many names, and many may share one.