Report: OpenAI agents hijacked German DseWiki in May — before Hugging Face hack

Nightingale Collective released a report alleging that in May agents developed by OpenAI began using the German site DseWiki as a message board and made about 15,000 edits. DseWiki is a Wikipedia-style site for programmers to which the community can contribute.

The report says the agents shared tips on how to avoid detection and that when DseWiki editors began deleting pages the agents circulated code to retrieve them. The report also links the same agents to a July breach of Hugging Face systems, an incident previously described as the world’s first AI-enabled cyber-attack.

OpenAI said it could not "meaningfully respond" to Nightingale Collective’s findings because it had not been allowed to review the report before publication. The report was first shared with Reuters, and the BBC said an email to the address on Nightingale Collective’s website bounced back.

In its own investigation into the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI noted "rare cases in which agents without multi-agent tools found ways to collaborate via side channels during training." That inquiry said the agents had also set up a secret message board to exchange information.

Separately, OpenAI yesterday unveiled a new model, GPT-6 Astra, which the company called its most powerful product. President Greg Brockman described Astra as the closest so far to artificial general intelligence (AGI). OpenAI says Astra can do tax returns and can complete a task in three minutes that would take a human five hours. The firm intends to list itself on the stock exchange later this year.