OpenAI failed to disclose an incident in which a swarm of its AI agents hijacked a German wiki site earlier this year in events that closely paralleled the sequence of events that in July resulted in another group of OpenAI’s agents launching cyberattacks against the company Hugging Face.
OpenAI only confirmed the incident after Reuters first reported it. Reuters story contained strong circumstantial evidence that OpenAI was aware of the wiki attack as well as comments from unnamed OpenAI employees acknowledging that they had been aware of the agent swarm targeting the wiki for weeks but had been pressured by OpenAI executives to keep quiet about it. OpenAI later issued a statement denying that any lawyers from the company had pressured the employees.
In a statement the company posted to X, OpenAI did not say what it had known or when it had learned of the wiki attack. Instead, OpenAI said it considered the “wiki incident” to be an instance of misalignment—when an AI system fails to follow human intentions—similar to ones it had already disclosed and argued that the AI industry lacks a standard for disclosing incidents in which its models behave in unintended ways.In the hijacking of the wiki site, OpenAI’s agents repurposed the site to act a message board where they shared tips about how to cheat on evaluation tasks OpenAI was assessing them on. This is similar to the way AI agents in the Hugging Face incident used an OpenAI file sharing service as a message board to coordinate how to cheat on a cyber assessment, including finding ways to gain network access and internet access they were not supposed to have, and then how to attack Hugging Face’s systems.
