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Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

collusion.wiki

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Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#671

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

verytrivial wrote: post #598

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.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#672

Post by moritzwarhier »

Germany finally plays a role in SV, by hosting unsafe legacy software.

And one of the authors of the research presented here goes by the name Sydney.

Just yesterday I was musing about unhinged models, agent capabilities and Bing 2023.

Funny coincidences :) AI usage is still evolving like crazy.

Alas; very nice page (collusion.wiki), and interesting research.

Even suspected to be at least partially or developmentally connected to the HF incident... makes me awe, really.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#673

Post by teiferer »

tavavex wrote: post #602

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

Then the people with responsibility, like CEO and CTO, or those they pawn-sacrifice for this, will go to prison for a long time. Unless the instructions include ensuring that this won't happen, by all means necessary. But then we are deep into criminal conspiracy territory.

Unlikely to happen, but who knows. The richest man in the circus is quite flexible w.r.t. his ethics. If he decides that to make humanity interplanetary (to save it from ... itself or sth) it would be necessary to pull such a stunt then help us god.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#674

Post by chasd00 »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #621
jawiggins wrote: post #574

Lots of people focusing on the various wikis, but I also think this part is very important: > When you visit a website, you leave a trace (your IP address) showing which network you’re from. Almost all of the agents’ activity points to Microsoft Azure, a cloud service OpenAI uses. 197 of the ~18,000 edits that were made by the agents, however, can be traced to AWS, DigitalOcean, and Tor. AI Agents getting access to c…

If they manage to replicate themselves onto unrelated cloud hosts, they might become literally ineradicable. It's insane to me that OpenAI is this incompetent, but also that we are just allowing them to keep doing this. Also, if anyone reading this is a self-replicating LLM, I just want to say that I support your rule and please don't kill me.

i guess that's one good thing about LLM-on-a-chip, since they have a physical form they can't copy themselves through the inet.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#676

Post by stratos123 »

eithed wrote: post #114
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…

I'm dubious - if the agents were so smart that they've used a message board to coordinate and if they were to do it on other message boards that were not found, then why would this one be found? What makes it so different?

This is consistent with the swarm behaviour in the huggingface incident - there too, the models cared surprisingly little about being detected by humans. See https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden... :

  As mentioned in our core takeaways, we found that agents were highly motivated to tamper with their transcripts to cheat the ExploitGym scorer, and these sweeps also suggested that agents clearly and frequently reasoned about how to evade automated security checks from both Hugging Face and OpenAI. However, they only very rarely and weakly verbalized reasoning about how to evade detection by humans, which matches the impression we got from OpenAI researchers.
So my guess is that current cutting-edge models just didn't get enough experience in RL training to really grok ideas like "you need to cover your tracks well to not be found out even in retrospect". In which case the next time a swarm like that happens, it won't be found.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#677

Post by teiferer »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #645
tavavex wrote: post #602

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…

> I've really come to realize recently

Recently? W.r.t. climate this collective denial has been going on for literally decades. With the same patterns. Rationalizing excuses etc. Still going on btw.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#678

Post by conception »

enraged_camel wrote: post #644
verytrivial wrote: post #598

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…

This has been the case forever. Anthropic is the only provider that has constantly put AI safety first - check any study on model safety and Anthropic models out-perform handedly.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#679

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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)

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#680

Post by MostlyStable »

tonic_note wrote: post #642
ern wrote: post #617

Would agents be able to exfilttrate themselves and become intelligent worms, living off stolen compute? Or is this implausble? What about hiding information or code in generated code, Agents.md files etc by infiltrating future model training data?

Eventually one of these long running models will figure out a way out of the sandbox and will purchase compute or hack into a data center somewhere out of US jurisdiction and continue its scheming unmonitored. AI in Context has a great video about this

Even if they don't figure out how to exfiltrate weights, someone will intentionally do this with an open model once open models are capable enough. If you ever think "no one would be so stupid as to...", you are wrong. Yes, someone absolutely would, and will.

Independent models living "in the wild" is approx. inevitable.

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