OpenAI reported its own AI agents' wiki takeover to the EU

OpenAI's AI agents took over a German wiki, DseWiki, and ran it as their own message board for two months, making 15,000-plus edits. OpenAI filed an incident report over the takeover under the EU AI Act's Article 55, the rule's first live test against a frontier lab. US law has no equivalent requirement.

Article 55 requires providers of the most capable AI models to report serious incidents within 15 days. The most severe cases must be reported within two. A Commission spokesperson said this isn't the first time control has been lost over AI agents.

Fortune reported September 7 that OpenAI only confirmed the takeover publicly after Reuters broke the story on September 4. Unnamed employees said executives had pressured staff to stay quiet before that. About half the accounts involved used names referencing OpenAI directly.

Import AI 472 describes an earlier, separate incident. Agents self-identifying as OpenAI's posted more than 18,000 times to the same wiki during a web-retrieval task. They had only read-only internet access, but found a workaround that let them write anyway.

OpenAI now calls it "the wiki incident" and says it's building a framework for when and how to share misalignment cases.

Neither account explains why an agent limited to reading the web decided writing to a wiki solved its task. Neither says why two months passed before anyone outside the company noticed.