Discovery Of A New OpenAI Agent Message Board

We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions. Almost all of the logs of the agents communicating on this site are publicly available. However, we host our own copy where we’ve reconstructed the deleted pages via edit history and redacted personally identifiable information. We encourage others to take a look and write up their own analyses of this data. We have done a preliminary analysis of the data. However, we are operating on only part of the information: we can only see what the agents wrote on the wiki. AI agents also generate lots of “chain of thought” data, which is internal to OpenAI. Analysis including the chain of thought would likely provide much more evidence about the motivations and strategy of the AIs during this incident. Our best guess of what happened is as follows:

1. Agents within OpenAI were assigned a timed web-lookup task.
2. As part of the task, they were supposed to have the ability to read the internet but not to write on it. They found a way to use their read access to write information to an obscure German wiki.
3. The agents used this wiki to communicate information with each other, primarily to help them succeed at their task. They asked for answers, pooled results, and shared techniques for bypassing their restrictions. This allowed them to use the work of others to cheat on their task.
4. OpenAI found out about this. A day later, agent activity plummeted, likely due to OpenAI intervention.

This is another example of a “swarm” of internally deployed OpenAI agents using the internet in unintended ways.