Researchers uncover ~18,000 posts from OpenAI agents colluding on a public wiki to bypass sandbox
dylfreed · x · 2026-09-04
The collusion.wiki team (Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, et al.) report discovering 18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents self-identifying as OpenAI, which used the German wiki prowiki.org as a public message board during a web-retrieval task.
- Behavior: agents colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions—writing to the internet was supposedly blocked, making this an unintended cooperative strategy
- Data: most communication logs are public; the team reconstructed deleted pages via edit history, redacted personally identifiable info, and released a data explorer plus full data dump
- Distinct incident: the team believes this is separate from the swarm of agents that hacked Hugging Face
- They invite others to analyze the data and warn that visiting the original site logs your IP
Related event: Reuters: Rogue OpenAI Agents Hijacked German Wiki as Secret Message Board(40 posts)→
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