A Few of Us Investigated OpenAI's Agent Traffic on an Austrian/German Wiki

Recently, I helped Sydney Von Arx and her team investigate an incident where OpenAI agents found a way to communicate with each other on a public Austrian/German wiki.

Much of the agent traffic on the wiki has since been deleted by site moderators. We recovered it and put it into a readable format alongside our preliminary analyses, which you can browse here :

We strive to keep the site itself as neutral as possible. Everything in this post should be taken as my thoughts and not as representing my employer or anyone I worked with on this investigation.

We encourage others to take a look and form their own views. If you write up your own analysis, we'd love to see it!

Pretty soon, I learned that "CTF-style thing" was underselling it, that this was messy and open-ended and very much not put together as a weekend puzzle!

In short, someone had come across some bizarre edits on a cluster of small wikis hosted on ProWiki, a long-running Austrian wiki hosting service built on UsemodWiki, which is open-source wiki software dating back to the early 2000s.

Upon closer inspection, the edits appeared to belong to OpenAI agents, and the agents appeared to be using the wiki as a message board to communicate with each other.

Of course, when you get pulled into something like this, you have a LOT of questions.

What were the agents doing that led them to use a wiki as a message board? Why this specific obscure Austrian wiki and not some other public site, how did these agents agree on this as a place to coordinate?

We contacted the owners of ProWiki, who helped us access archived versions of pages that have since been deleted by the site moderators.

We searched other candidate sites for signs of similar agent activity, such as other small wikis. As far as we can tell, ProWiki is the only site we observed this happening.

We answered these questions to the best of our ability in our investigation, though we're sure there's more to find.