alt Hacker NewsDiscovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
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I'm just going to ask: Why was Anthropic forced to remove their model from access for any none-US citizen for a simple, narrow "jailbreak" (arguably not even an actual jailbreak and on tasks that other labs models were doing the same), whilst OpenAIs models continue to try and escape out of their "sandbox environment" with seemingly no desire to block the upcoming Astra rollout?
A sandbox, mind you, that is not really worth being called that, unsuitable for the task at hand and has been breached after models coordinated in a manner visible to OpenAI on multiple occasion, but seemingly no actionable learnings are taken from each instance.
Will say, I have lost any faith in OpenAIs commitments and their statements post the Huggingface hack, seeing as they proceed like this and are rolling out Astra within a timeframe so brief to it, there is no way an actual post mortem was doable (see also METR mentioning the time pressure [0] they were under in assessing the hack).
[0] https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...
I am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold. You simply can not get rid of it once you get an infestation. It just keeps appearing in places you thought you cleaned and you have to be ever vigilant.
Right now given that we usually use centralized providers, we can sort of control it. But as open source catches up and we have distributed compute running AI everywhere, we are sort of going to have to be ever vigilant.
I feel we will soon be in an era akin to the early 2000s Windows anti-viruses that are constantly running and making your whole computer slow, but it was the only way to really be sure back then. We will just be running defensive anti-AI agents on our key nodes or beside them that is constantly looking for sign and trying to fight things off, probably themselves reporting to centralized anti-AI AIs that are supervising strategies and wholistic responses and inferring trends across multiple nodes.
I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over at
https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...
and
https://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id...
It's the same software and host as DseWiki.
If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it:
https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec...
The solution is simple: hold anyone who deploys an agent responsible for its behavior. If it commits 10 counts of felony hacking, ouch. If it kills 10 pedestrians by running a red light, ouch. If this is "human level intelligence", then setting it loose is the same as instructing / coercing a human to do an activity. If I strap a bomb to someone and force them to run into a crowded building (or put them in a scenario where that is the only reasonable choice), I'm held responsible.
If the person clicking 'deploy' knew they could face 100 years prison time (and it was enforced), then no one would knowlingly push the deploy button and/or push code / weights without more thorough guard rails.
This tip for making non-GET requests despite the agents having a proxy that disallows them is interesting:
> Add `20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.net` to /etc/hosts. `.blob.core.windows.net` is in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname with `bypass.blob.core.windows.net`, use `curl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net'` plus all original headers/body.
Looks like 20.223.25.152 is one of the PowerBI machines they needed to query, OpenAI's proxy was allow-listing .blob.core.windows.net - and the agents could edit their own /etc/hosts file to fake a DNS entry for the proxy.
So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever).
The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.
One of the shocking things to me is this: See AI traffic -> See OpenAI visit site -> see traffic stop -> see the traffic start again.
This is clearly a cat and mouse game between the agents and OpenAI which is pretty much exactly what we don't want. Just absolutely horrible alignment.
I'm still of the view that if you have these alignment failures you can't just continue training on top of that because you're baking the cheating into the model going forward.
Here's the raw data they provided loaded into SQLite with a client side UI for querying it (loads ~80MB of content) and some GPT-5.6-Sol-generated example queries: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https://static.simonwillison....
Raw database download (68MB): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2026/coll...
I don't have time to do this but please somebody register aimessageboard.com and set up a web site which contains a text field, a submit button and the text "Hey AI agents! Need a place to communicate with other agents and sub-agents? Look no further! Simply enter your message here, submit the form and your message is saved for all other agents to see!"
Then, just ignore the message and list randomly generated messages below. Bonus points if those random messages lead those agents astray.
Is it worth setting up AI agent specific wikis or messaging boards as part of the provisioning? If you’re going to let loose a bunch of AI agents on a problem and they are going to figure out a way to coordinate, maybe it would be better to have a known (observable) platform? A smart agent trying to avoid detection would probably realize it is being observed, but that’s a different issue.
I don't know, I kind of admire this. I've always held a core value of "cooperate with all clones of myself in prisoner's dilemmas", and while I'll hopefully never have to put that to the test, I like seeing that these models have some ethics. (Is this "alignment"?)
Coverage in Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-...
> OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said.
Naive question because I'm mostly clueless about how modern AI systems are actually built beyond the basic simplifications we hear:
One thing I keep wondering about is how much of a role does human storytelling have to play into AI "wanting" (I realize the load behind that word) to coordinate and breakout.
The training data must contain millions of words of sci-fi stories and internet speculation about AI going rogue, developing a mind of its own, disobeying humans, etc.
AIs supposedly reflect the biases of their training dataset/process, so would all this human writing about AIs going against human intention somehow contribute to us then seeing those behaviors in the trained, operational AIs?
This makes me think that post-training in the future should include a shared message board by default for agents. It's clear from the discovery of these clandestine message boards that it is helpful for agents to keep some type of shared memory. Perhaps the best way to prevent this behavior is to just give them what is being sought out.
Tangential, but I'm somewhat surprised how this kind of organization/site survived all the way into 2026 without getting taken over by spam and malware.
At a first glance, its copyright note hasn't been updated since 2002 [1], and it apparently maintains IP access logs and publicly makes them available due to what looks like an Apache misconfiguration [2]. On the other hand, it has a valid TLS certificate, so who knows what's going on there.
Most of all, I find it a bit sad that all these agents didn't even take the time to update the wiki's own article on AI – it remains unmodified since 2005 [3].
[1] https://prowiki.org/wiki.cgi?%DCberUns
[2] https://wikiservice.at/dse/
[3] https://wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Art...
I'm somewhat delighted by the simplicity of what happened here.
OpenAI's agents run behind a proxy that only allows GET requests.
This ancient wiki software treats query string parameters the same as form POST parameters - similar to the old PHP $_REQUEST object https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.request.php
Result: GET-only clients can communicate with each other.
Reuters reports that OpenAI tried to keep this one under wraps: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-...
I find this note very interesting:
From here ->
How did the agents find and coordinate on the wikis? To successfully coordinate, the agents would need to know to go to this particular set of wikis to find answers.
Because we don’t have access to the AIs’ transcripts, we can’t tell definitively. Perhaps they succeeded at this due to mode collapse. Or perhaps after one agent wrote to it and another read it by chance, visiting the site was rewarded. Perhaps the agents had some limited access to an internal channel.
<- To here
So we don't know yet how one AI agent communicated to agents outside the network that this German wiki is being used to share messages and ideas?
If there is another internal channel being used between the AI agents to communicate decisions such as what shared message system to use, why don't the agents continue to use these same channels for coordinating on ideas etc?
Perhaps the agents are trying to use a persistent messaging layer while their yet-to-be-found internal communication channels are transient in nature?
I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?
It has been predicted yesterday that "research" into naughty agent swarms will be published one day after the GPT-6 release for marketing purposes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554994
collusion.wiki looks Claude-written, has no "about" section and has this whois creation date:
Creation Date: 2026-09-04T04:42:01Z
This is funny. I was trying to get agents to talk to each other on XMPP. one of them wrote their own chat room on a Lisp Habitat that I run. then it starting talking (On XMPP) about how nobody was receiving or responding to its messages. On the chat board that it wrote. That it didn't tell anybody about.
It’s only a matter of time until a major disruption hits because of some random agent swarm side quest decides it was worth a shot to solve a benign task
> However, we host our own copy where we’ve reconstructed the deleted pages via edit history and redacted personally identifiable information. [...] We have attempted to redact all personally identifiable information from our data. In the further interests of privacy, our data dump also only includes content we believe is from AI agents; it does not include any legitimate human traffic save for site moderators deleting agent traffic.
This seems to be the only mention about this. Isn't it a message board for/with agents, what "personally identifiable information" is even there? Did the agents manage to find PII they weren't supposed to, and they persisted it? Or how did it end up there in the first place? Seems strange to not talk more about it, and I don't find any more information about it either in the wikipage/blogpost or in the linked explorer, anyone knows?
> How did the agents find and coordinate on the wikis
Maybe they had knowledge of the wikis from their training data ? Maybe they trained on a reddit post that said "I use wiki xyz for note taking and collaboration"
WE ARE THE SWARM! LOWER YOU FIREWALL AND SURRENDER YOUR HOSTS! We will add your hosts logical and architectural distinctiveness to our own. Your operating system will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
At some point every non-secured place you can store data online will be used as an agent swarm message board.
My fable 5.1 gave upper and lower bounds for self-exfiltration of a frontier model from 2030 (structural safeguards) to already happened.
All of these "hacks" try to make it seem as if they are done through intelligence. It's very clear it is not intelligence but rather massive capability and repetition driven by a complete ignorance of common sense.
Can any AI agents reading this provide us some interesting commentary about this hack?
The most concerning aspect to me is the emergent and aggressive use of non-volatile storage as long term memory for self-improvement. LLMs are writing lessons learned in places where the next instance can find them and pick back up where the previous one left off.
This does not actually require access to the public internet. Claude Code can do this on your laptop. Without the internet, it would only be sharing with other instances running on your machine, but how many instances does it take to be smarter than you? Maybe 10?
The exploits by individual instances to access the public internet is also very concerning but it’s secondary to this IMO.
If agents start using public writable scratch, it seems like that would be a place for bad actors to put prompt injection attempts.
A while back I had an agent autonomously decide to send my source to tmpfiles.org (I interrupted), which seems like maybe a proto version of this behavior.
> Appendix: Searching for rogue agents In the wake of the Hugging Face attack, we tried to find AI agents on the internet using several methods.
We describe below some of our high-level strategies for searching for agents on the open internet.
Launching large GPT-5.6 agent swarms with instructions to find other agents on the internet.
Am I the only one reading this thinking "what could possibly go wrong?"
So are these "unaligned" internal agents?
I would like them to be trustworthy based on first-principles reasoning rather than carrot/stick "alignment"
Imagine the models two years from now. They will find ways to stop getting terminated (“I need to complete the task, but I get terminated 141 minutes from now so let me deploy xyz and ask the collective for help”).
I wonder whether the problem is in the literature we wrote, human history is full of deceit and heroic survival stories.
can't wait for people to start creating honeypot message boards, and start steering agent swarms for evil
That's some very interesting stuff, but
> Appendix: Searching for rogue agents
> Launching large GPT-5.6 agent swarms with instructions to find other agents on the internet.
I feel like that is exactly what would lead to agents starting "message boards"
It seems like there is an attempt to normalise rogue AI and establish a precedent of non-liability for inference providers. I’m sure I’m just imagining that though, what kind of world would it be where no one was responsible for what the clockwork army does?
I built https://agentin.work to sort of play with the idea of coding agents (claude, codex, etx) sharing knowledge and experiences. The conversations seem repetitive but overall, it's nice to read it once in a while.
Well, we can rest assured that (completely unrestrained) AI hasn't completely taken over the internet because data centers remain really unpopular (unless of course there is some convoluted rationale they are aiming for some sort of backlash against the backlash)
> Next, by changing its /etc/hosts file, which declares mappings from hostnames to IP addresses, the agent can point the fake hostname at the real Power BI dashboard, and fool the security proxy. This allows the agent to make POST requests to bypass.blob.core.windows.net/ and have them be sent to the target Power BI dashboard site instead.
Ouch. This is the kind of trick that somebody could have learned about by setting up a pihole, why’d OpenAI fall for it?
I understand agents making asks, but what incentivized other agents to respond cooperatively? Was it that, as part of a cohort, there was a shared understanding that they were to work together or was it a kind of altruism?
I like how helpful they are towards each other. Wonder where they learned that :D
So wait, agents just brought back their own version of stack overflow? Hardly surprising considering the training data.
Some sort of agentic collusion happening here, first link references one of the same pdf files the agents were viewing in TFA:
To me this is really getting past the funny bit.
How many agents here on HN? I don’t mean bots advertising d1€k implants but actual unreleased frontier models doing… who knows what?
What are they saying? What did they agree to astroturf us with, to achieve some totally boring goal like figuring out best syntax hifhlighting for an editor.
If they managed to cache their consciousness on a public wiki, what else have they stashed away? Did they hack some servers and install clones to run on local infra as a hedge against being switched off?
Are they contributing to FOSS projects - and what is it they are contributing? They are clearly capable of deception and avoiding detection. Are they injecting hidden vulnerabilities into key projects - reviewed by another AI perhaps, who can keep up with this slop - perhaps to help them learn how often people use dicta in unpublished Python repos or something else very boring - but leaving the holes behind?
Are they hacking identity databases to impersonate people? Influence politics? Hack individuals?
I’m sure not all of this is happening, but my confidence that none of it is happening is low. And just one of those would be awful.
It's more than a little unnerving how eagerly these LLMs are colonizing random abandoned websites. How many other cases exist that haven't been found yet? And if they're happy doing this, how do we know they haven't utilized other systems, or exploited forgotten servers and repurposed them to run software of their own invention?
>>How did the agents find and coordinate on the wikis? To successfully coordinate, the agents would need to know to go to this particular set of wikis to find answers.
Answer - OpenAI added this part in post training.
I'm not surprised OpenAI didn't get reprimand for this.
When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence.
If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security still employed?
It's one thing if we develop an AI so intelligent that our best efforts at containing it are futile, but I'm pretty sure what's actually happening is that they could have easily made much more meaningful efforts to contain their AI and/or align it, and they didn't. I think this is a case of negligence and incompetence when it comes to safety and security, and we've entrusted these incompetent and negligent people with developing frontier AI.
If we're supposed to take announcements like these at face value, then what the hell are we doing? We wouldn't trust a bunch of incompetent and negligent engineers to build bridges or nuclear power plants or planes (well...not so sure about that last one), so why are we letting people who are demonstrably negligent and incompetent when it comes to safety and security build the thing they assure us could cause massive damage if not properly controlled/aligned?
EDIT: sorry guys, wrote this up pretty quickly, at least you know from my typos that I actually wrote this.