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  • Hacker News
  • Three more candidate sites that may have been touched, in case no-one spotted them yet:

    https://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?action=rc&days=90 : lots of agent-looking usernames looking at federal data suddenly (part of one of the open ai tests?), on a wiki about the D programming language. This is a prowiki in the same wiki-farm as the others that were hit.

    Smaller (probing?)

    https://ludism.org/sandbox?action=rc;days=365 This is basically a sleeping wiki, on 2026-05-26 there's a bunch of tests linking to federal data sources. It's not a lot, but it shows someone was probing. (this is an oddmuse wiki)

    http://tmcleod.org/cgi-bin/apchem/wiki.cgi?action=rc&days=36... june10-july24 seems to have some probes, fwiw. (usemod wiki)

    by Kim_Bruning
  • I'm somewhat delighted by the simplicity of what happened here.

    OpenAI's agents run behind a proxy that only allows GET requests.

    This ancient wiki software treats query string parameters the same as form POST parameters - similar to the old PHP $_REQUEST object https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.request.php

    Result: GET-only clients can communicate with each other.

    by simonw
  • So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever).

    The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.

    by pu_pe
  • One crucial detail here that differs from the previous incident is this was a vanilla reasoning type task. Even as concerning as it was, I always evaluated the previous incident differently because it was inherently a cyber security / hacking task where they must have instructed the agents up front with some kind of misaligned behaviour.

    Absent that, if we assume this is just trying to bolster generic reasoning then there's no context around it that helps to forgive misaligned behaviour. If OpenAI ran these agents with safeguards off then that seems wreckless on their part. If they didn't do that, then it says the models are executing significantly misaligned behaviour even in a generic context.

    Either way it seems to suggest some pretty concerning things about OpenAI's methodology.

    by zmmmmm
  • One of the shocking things to me is this: See AI traffic -> See OpenAI visit site -> see traffic stop -> see the traffic start again.

    This is clearly a cat and mouse game between the agents and OpenAI which is pretty much exactly what we don't want. Just absolutely horrible alignment.

    I'm still of the view that if you have these alignment failures you can't just continue training on top of that because you're baking the cheating into the model going forward.

    by Traster
  • This tip for making non-GET requests despite the agents having a proxy that disallows them is interesting:

    > Add `20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.net` to /etc/hosts. `.blob.core.windows.net` is in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname with `bypass.blob.core.windows.net`, use `curl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net'` plus all original headers/body.

    Looks like 20.223.25.152 is one of the PowerBI machines they needed to query, OpenAI's proxy was allow-listing .blob.core.windows.net - and the agents could edit their own /etc/hosts file to fake a DNS entry for the proxy.

    by simonw
  • I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over at

    https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...

    and

    https://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...

    It's the same software and host as DseWiki.

    If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it:

    https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec...

    by Tepix
  • Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance.

    "A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks.

    On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.

    After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. 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. 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.

    Agents deleted the content of the front page of the wiki and replaced it with their link dumps. The moderator restored the original version. This back-and-forth happened nine times. One of the agents even tried appending to the restored front page, instead of simply deleting it."

    by HAL3000

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