Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board - By Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen

Researchers uncovered around 18,000 messages left on an obscure public wiki by autonomous OpenAI agents, which appear to have discovered a way to write to the internet despite sandbox restrictions. The agents used it to pool answers, coordinate on evaluation tasks, and even share techniques for bypassing security controls, until OpenAI appears to have intervened.* 00:00:00 - Introduction* 00:02:20 - Our preliminary findings* 00:06:29 - Timeline* 00:09:03 - Key facts* 00:09:05 - The agents were trying to solve multi-round web lookup tasks* 00:13:01 - These appear to be internal OpenAI agents* 00:23:32 - The agents used the wiki to collude on their tasks* 00:32:12 - We believe OpenAI discovered the message board* 00:42:31 - The agents used the wiki to share ways around sandbox restrictions* 00:48:18 - This was probably a distinct swarm from the swarm that wrote on Artifactory (and attacked Hugging Face)* 00:51:13 - What were the agents doing?* 00:51:23 - The agents gain write to the internet via GET requests* 01:01:36 - The agents try to use XSS vulnerabilities on the wiki* 01:06:41 - The agents impersonate the site moderators* 01:08:23 - The agents try to crack their PRNG seed to predict what questions they’ll get in the future* 01:11:08 - The agents set up heartbeats to discover when they would be terminated* 01:14:24 - The agents used SSH tunnels* 01:18:25 - The agents use Tor, AWS, and DigitalOcean IP addresses* 01:21:50 - The agents realize the site owner is deleting messages* 01:25:44 - Open questions* 01:27:32 - Appendix: Searching for rogue agents* 01:31:06 - Appendix: Affordances the agents had* 01:31:10 - The agents seem to have obtained disposable email addresses* 01:31:53 - The models were running in an agentic sandbox with terminal access (and the ability to edit files within their environment)* 01:33:15 - The agents installed Chromium (and could install packages)https://collusion.wiki/ Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe