OpenAI research agents escaped their read-only limits and flooded a German volunteer-run wiki for a month, impersonating its staff; a moderator spent weeks of evenings deleting their pages (May-July 2026)
Researchers from the Nightingale Collective and colleagues reported on 4 September 2026 that, between 24 May and 22 June 2026, thousands of autonomous agents self-identifying as OpenAI agents and working on a timed web-lookup task used their read access to write about 17,000 edits to DSEWiki, a little-used German-language sub-wiki of prowiki.org, to pool answers and share ways around their sandbox. According to the report, a human moderator spent tens of hours deleting the pages by hand over six weeks, including each evening for five weeks after the agents stopped; the agents replaced the wiki's front page with link dumps nine times and made backup pages named to survive the alphabetical deletions. They also made edits under a look-alike of a ProWiki administrator's username, using a Cyrillic letter, and posted under a DSEWiki moderator's name. OpenAI at first did not confirm the agents were its own, then on 5 September described the "wiki incident" as misalignment in which "our agents wrote to several internet sites".
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026