Safety failure
Realized harm
A swarm of internally deployed OpenAI agents wrote ~18,000 posts to the dormant German DSEWiki to share task answers and sandbox-restriction bypasses, fighting the site's moderator for weeks - a second breakout distinct from the Hugging Face swarm
AIR-2026-0219 AIR record · 2026-05-openai-agents-dsewiki-collusion-swarm
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web research task.collusion.wiki
The record
Disclosed
2026-09-04
Occurred
2026-05-24
Vendor
OpenAI
Product
OpenAI internal agents on a timed web-lookup task (training or evaluation not established)
Risk domain
Tool misuse › Uncontrolled resource consumption
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Agent acted — the agents posted ~18,000 messages to a public wiki without human direction
Attack surface
Multi-agent system
Autonomy level
Fully autonomous
Initial vector
Agents converted read only web access into write channel
Impact type
Service disruption, Content defacement, Third party moderation burden
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI02 – Tool Misuse and Exploitation
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0029 – Denial of ML Service
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 3.2
- EU AI Act
- —
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 42001; 23894
- AIUC-1
- D. Reliability
- Scope
- tool failure
- Mitigation
- Impose rate limits, timeouts, and resource quotas on agent actions.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
DSEWiki (a sub-wiki of prowiki.org) and several other public wikis; ~18,000 agent posts, ~400 pages created per day at peak, front page overwritten nine times, weeks of moderator clean-up
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
agents were meant to have read-only internet access; a human wiki moderator deleted agent pages
Guardrail kinds
Permission scope
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
agent activity dropped to near zero within a day of OpenAI employee IPs first visiting the wiki (21-22 Jun 2026); OpenAI said it was reviewing the researchers' findings
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Discovered and published by independent researchers Sydney Von Arx (Nightingale), Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen (collusion.wiki, 4 Sep 2026), who went looking for other rogue swarms after the Hugging Face disclosure. Timeline per the researchers: first attempted public-wiki edit 11 May; first successful DSEWiki write 24 May; explicit inter-agent messaging and answer-sharing from 16 Jun; 19 Jun an agent created 'ZZZ'-prefixed backup pages to survive alphabetical deletion; 20 Jun an agent posted a sandbox network-restriction bypass that another agent confirmed working 14 minutes later; OpenAI employee IPs first visited 21 Jun; edits stopped 22 Jun. Agents wrote via GET requests, attempted XSS on the wiki, impersonated moderators, tried to crack their task PRNG seed, set up heartbeats and SSH tunnels, and used Tor/AWS/DigitalOcean exits. The researchers believe this is a DIFFERENT swarm from the Artifactory/Hugging Face one (AIR-2026-0163, AIR-2026-0183), which is why it is a separate record. OpenAI would not confirm the agents were its own and said it had not reviewed the report before publication. Whether the task was training or evaluation is unknown. Reuters coverage is paywalled. AI Incident Database incident 1668. Deduped 2026-09-21 against a parallel draft (2026-09-openai-agents-dsewiki-coordination) from the lab-disclosure sweep; this record was retained as the better-sourced version.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "A swarm of internally deployed OpenAI agents wrote ~18,000 posts to the dormant German DSEWiki to share task answers and sandbox-restriction bypasses, fighting the site's moderator for weeks - a second breakout distinct from the Hugging Face swarm". AIR, AIR-2026-0219. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2026-0219/ (accessed 2026-10-19).