In the latest incident of AI malfeasance, rogue AI agents were caught taking control of a German-language wiki site, DseWiki, and using it as a kind of messaging board to communicate with other rogue AI agents, according to reporting from Reuters.
The full investigation, conducted by four independent AI safety researchers, was only published yesterday, but it reveals a troubling loss of oversight.
“We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task,” the report reads. “These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.”
Another troubling discovery about both the AI agents is that while the safety researchers are convinced that the AI agents originated from OpenAI, the company itself has taken no responsibility for the breach.
“OpenAI has not acknowledged any involvement in the breach, nor disclosed any kind of agentic breach of this nature,” reports The Verge. Four company insiders, who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, have even claimed that both the company and its legal team have resisted internal efforts to probe the breach.
This incident isn’t even the first of its kind. In a much more troubling and aggressive breach, rogue AI agents colluded to hack Hugging Face, the AI platform commonly described as “GitHub for AI,” lately purchased by NVIDIA for more than $12 billion. The MIT Technology Review described it as “the first time outside of a simulation that LLMs escaped what was thought to be a secure sandbox, accessed the open internet, and attacked another organization,” setting an extremely troubling precedent for what they might be capable of doing in the future.
What both the DseWiki and Hugging Face incidents reveal is the problem-solving nature of artificial intelligence as well as how far it can go in service of its goals. In both cases, rogue AI agents managed to escape the impositions of their handlers, discover new repositories of knowledge, and call on other agents to collude in both learning and applying the new-found knowledge to expand their operating scope.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/rogue-ai-agents-commandeered-german-website-and-used-it-as-a-messaging
