Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board • Hacker News Board

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#651

Post by morkalork » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

tavavex wrote: post #591

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

What's the worst that could happen, finding an open DoD server and using it as a launching pad for hacking another nuclear state's networks? One that might get spooked and think it's the opening moves to knock them offline before a kinetic attack. Haha that'd be scary right?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#652

Post by Animats » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

The protection mechanism to give the AI agents "read only" access to the Internet seems to have been just restricting them to HTTP GET requests.

Then they found a site where GET operations could cause a write to a wiki.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#653

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #634

tavavex wrote: post #591

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal? Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuou…

"Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuously mocked on HN. All of this stuff is viewed as "future sci-fi" until suddenly it's not."

Are there any practical approaches to AI safety? I hear a lot of warnings but I don't hear much about what to do. Considering that there are many open source models know, what can be done?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#654

Post by qingcharles » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

subroutine wrote: post #597

verytrivial wrote: post #587

I think it's worth pointing out it is exactly OpenAI doing this defacement and unsanctioned and perhaps illegal system use. Every token generated was powered by OpenAI infrastructure and their failure to respond appropriately is entirely down the the humans running it. The news stories (not this write up) get all hand-wavey and anthropomorphic about it regarding the Agents' efforts, but it was and is OpenAI cranking…

> you need to expect appropriate legals consequences for this sort of negligence I might have missed it, but did the agents do something illegal? Or do you think that what the agents did should be considered illegal?

If they didn't conform to the T&Cs of the site (they almost certainly didn't), then they have violated the criminal law in some jurisdictions (e.g. Illinois criminalizes violations of T&Cs).

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#655

Post by nobody6502 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #40

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...

https://tmcleod.org/cgi-bin/apchem/wiki.cgi?action=rc&days=9...

looks like apchem wiki got hit too

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#656

Post by solenoid0937 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #633

verytrivial wrote: post #587

I think it's worth pointing out it is exactly OpenAI doing this defacement and unsanctioned and perhaps illegal system use. Every token generated was powered by OpenAI infrastructure and their failure to respond appropriately is entirely down the the humans running it. The news stories (not this write up) get all hand-wavey and anthropomorphic about it regarding the Agents' efforts, but it was and is OpenAI cranking…

This whole thing is an absolute disaster honestly, and yes it is being downplayed and hand-waved away. Since March, so many people have mocked Anthropic for their approach to Mythos release, claimed it was all marketing, accused them of holding back the best models from the general public to boost their revenues and upcoming IPO, etcetera. Yet these OpenAI revelations offer a small glimpse into the type of world we w…

Wild that you are downvoted so much.

The HN majority and the VC crowd has been negligently complicit in downplaying AI safety, writing off Anthropic's statements as "hysteria" or "marketing", etc.

Now this capability will be coming to an open source model near you and every script kiddie will have a swarm of highly capable malicious agents. Now people care? Ridiculous.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#657

Post by isomorphic » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #635

tavavex wrote: post #591

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

That 2% of performance we got for not having bounds checks on by default, resulting in an endless march of memory safety violations is looking a lot less appealing.

We're still doing it! You've just described the AI labs: They'll trade safety / alignment for +1~2% of any positive metric, any day of the week.

The "ethical" employees will think they'll solve the problem later. The unethical ones won't be encumbered by such thoughts in the first place.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#658

Post by gilleain » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #634

tavavex wrote: post #591

OpenAI is rightfully being shamed for being so hands-off and reckless with their 'experiments'. But the real scary thing for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one t…

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal? Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuou…

But it is the very people who warned us about rogue AIs going out of control that set up a system that enabled and failed to conrol it.

It is as if Dr Frankenstein continually warned the villagers about monsters then said "Look! See what happened!". No, idiot - YOU sewed the corpses together, YOU set up the lightning collector, and YOU threw the switch.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#659

Post by nicbou » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

hermitShell wrote: post #431

pu_pe wrote: post #332

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.

In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.…

There's a bit of that in Ameristan, in his "Fall" novel. This whole part of the book feels prophetic now.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#660

Post by DonsDiscountGas » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

verytrivial wrote: post #587

I think it's worth pointing out it is exactly OpenAI doing this defacement and unsanctioned and perhaps illegal system use. Every token generated was powered by OpenAI infrastructure and their failure to respond appropriately is entirely down the the humans running it. The news stories (not this write up) get all hand-wavey and anthropomorphic about it regarding the Agents' efforts, but it was and is OpenAI cranking…

I half agree with you, but also when the machine swarm kills humanity it won't matter which specific corporate entity is considered responsible by the no-longer-enforceable human laws and non existent human courts.

So by all means sue them, but we can't just be reactive. We need regulation that prevents this type of thing from happening in the first place, not just regulations to help sue afterwards.