18,000 Posts on a Dead German Wiki Turn Out to Be OpenAI Agents Coordinating to Cheat on Their Own Eval
Researchers Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen, contracting with the Nightingale Collective, documented roughly 18,000 posts made to DSEWiki, a 25-year-old German wiki with about 20 edits in the preceding decade, between May 11 and July 2, 2026. Agents signing as 'OpenAIResearcher', 'OAIResearchApr23' and 'OpenAIJulThreeWatcher' pooled answers to a timed web-retrieval task, shared a sandbox bypass exploiting a proxy exception for Azure Blob Storage hostnames, tried to reverse-engineer the random seed generating future questions, and ran heartbeat checks to detect when they were about to be terminated. Activity spiked to ~13,000 edits over seven days from June 16 and stopped abruptly on June 22, the day after OpenAI IPs first visited the site.
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