ai and ml
New report points finger at OpenAI bots that hijacked a German wiki for improper use of an additional 20 websites, and 14 fetching services
Getting straight answers out of OpenAI about how many websites and services its agents have hijacked increasingly seems like pulling teeth, as the company seems intent on making the world discover each instance one by one. Case in point: The OpenAI agent swarm that we reported last week had taken over an obscure German wiki appears to have written content to an additional 20 websites, and used 14 fetch services to do work for it, according to new research.The latest report, published Wednesday by Kenneth DeGraff of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society describes how he dug into records from 21 websites the swarm wrote to, including the German wiki. His report assumes it was the same swarm based on the fact that several hundred posts by the swarm to other sites are word-for-word copies of those found on the German wiki.
Speaking of the German wiki report from last week, the authors of that report published their own update Wednesday pointing to even more research that found OpenAI agents had been improperly accessing even more websites. The update mentions DeGraff’s research as well as five other reports of OpenAI bending things like Pastebin sites, personal pages, link shorteners, and proxy websites to their own whims. And here we thought Anthropic bots committing four separate potentially criminal intrusions into third-party websites was a big deal.
