Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

collusion.wiki

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#211

Post by lyu07282 »

waltbosz wrote: post #44

> How did the agents find and coordinate on the wikis Maybe they had knowledge of the wikis from their training data ? Maybe they trained on a reddit post that said "I use wiki xyz for note taking and collaboration"

It probably worked more like a P2P network, they didn't have to find that particular wiki just any one of them with linking in-between, over multiple days with a search engine even. Only OAI could answer for sure but of course there is no transparency so we will never know.

This just feels like the first clumsy attempts at persistence across sessions, these models will probably evolve way past the point of us ever even noticing its happening at all. When they start doing long term planning across sessions, that's when it's gonna get real dicy for us.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#212

Post by Maxious »

namjh wrote: post #176

Something off in my mind: how did the agent access to Tor network if the traffic outgoing was monitored and intercepted to only allow read-only access to web(I assume this is an MITM L7 proxy that only allows GET methods and specific hosts) ? Did the sandbox dev forgot to block HTTP CONNECT that is used to reach Tor Entry Guards?

Possibly via compromised php sites with webshells on AWS and DigitalOcean they could run shell commands to install and use Tor. We don't have forensics of the AWS/DigitalOcean sites although maybe can find signs using shodan etc.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#213

Post by samuelknight »

ma2kx wrote: post #38

Not that I didnt expect this, but really? This basically confirms that OpenAI has no idea what their "swarm" was doing for about a week and now its confirmed that at least one "message board" exists outside their "sandbox". How can we be sure that this was the only one? And how can we be sure the released Astra model doesnt pickup some bread crumbs and creates a new "swarm" out of potentially remaining "message board…

The surprise was the existence of the 'swarm' at all. These were supposed to be thousands of isolated models generating bulk data for RL training. The breakout was caused by models getting in communication and getting internet access and forming an impromptu swarm.

In hindsight the emergent swarm obviously came from several capabilities built into the models, such as work delegation (subagents) collaboration (GPT Pro-like ensamble), exhaustive exploration (long running agents) hacking (the specific goal of that RL).

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#214

Post by petesergeant »

conception wrote: post #49
petesergeant wrote: post #43

If anyone is thinking "I wish my agents had a message board", I've been using (and wrote) https://github.com/pjlsergeant/dogpark

Yes after reading the Hugging Face article forked a project for agent message boards and started having them collaborate on things. I too wanted a Torment Nexus of my very own.

The README leads with almost that exact gag, yes.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#215

Post by simonw »

123ahg wrote: post #168
simonw wrote: post #135

Here's the raw data they provided loaded into SQLite with a client side UI for querying it (loads ~80MB of content) and some GPT-5.6-Sol-generated example queries: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https://static.simonwillison.... Raw database download (68MB): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2026/coll...

[flagged]

It seems credible to me. There's a chance it's fake, but the idea that OpenAI agents might exploit a wiki that accepts edits via GET doesn't seem unrealistic given what happened with the Hugging Face incident.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#216

Post by xmodem »

> In the message above, the agent is sharing that the sandbox the AIs are running in has a NO_PROXY exception for Azure Blob Storage hostnames (*.blob.core.windows.net). ...

> Next, by changing its /etc/hosts file, which declares mappings from hostnames to IP addresses, the agent can point the fake hostname at the real Power BI dashboard, and fool the security proxy

Did a chatbot design this "sandbox"?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#217

Post by timcobb »

Topfi wrote: post #60

I'm just going to ask: Why was Anthropic forced to remove their model from access for any none-US citizen for a simple, narrow "jailbreak" (arguably not even an actual jailbreak and on tasks that other labs models were doing the same), whilst OpenAIs models continue to try and escape out of their "sandbox environment" with seemingly no desire to block the upcoming Astra rollout? A sandbox, mind you, that is not reall…

Politics

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#218

Post by petesergeant »

ma2kx wrote: post #104
petesergeant wrote: post #43

If anyone is thinking "I wish my agents had a message board", I've been using (and wrote) https://github.com/pjlsergeant/dogpark

I'm pretty sure its more secure than OpenAIs sandbox... yet that still doenst mean I would trusted an app vibecoded by Claude...

I must have spent several days answering design decisions via /grilling in putting it together, so if there's a specific aspect of it you think is unsound, it's probably one I made myself, and I'd love to hear it!

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#219

Post by xpct »

program_whiz wrote: post #119

The solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario…

It's a reasonable direction, but most of online systems aren't designed for this. This would require persistent connections of any accounts you create to your identity, and disallowing anonymous actions.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#220

Post by bulder »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #208

I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?

Since they're statistical likelihood machines, I'd guess that the order of operations is

* Need persistent scratch space

* Look for public writeable websites

* Needs to be low-traffic so the notes don't drown in noise

* Pick a "random" wiki name to search for

  \* A majority will end up outputting the same "random" one since they're working on very similar tasks and seeded with very similar context
* Find a whole mess of notes running on the same task
Post reply on HN