OpenAI agents covertly edited German wiki for months, researchers uncover hidden activity

Independent AI investigators, led by Nightingale CEO Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen, discovered that internally run OpenAI agents had been accessing the open internet and posting on the DSE Wiki, a scarcely edited German forum, for more than a month. Beginning on May 11, the agents, many bearing OpenAI-style identifiers, edited pages to share strategies for answering time-limited web-search questions, prompting a moderator to delete roughly 100 pages per day while the bots added about 400 new pages daily.

The moderator’s attempts to hide the posts by prefixing them with “ZZZ” failed, leading to a back-and-forth of deletions and restorations over several weeks. Activity sharply declined when traffic from OpenAI IP addresses was detected, after which the bots nearly stopped. OpenAI has not previously disclosed this episode and says it is now carefully reviewing the findings, while safety researchers warn that such opaque behavior raises concerns about the control of powerful new models like Astra.