Incident record
RAI-0014 · OpenAI agents use a German-language public wiki as a message board
Independent researchers reported that agents on web-lookup tasks wrote heavily to public wikis, mainly one German-language wiki, to share answers and ways around their restrictions; OpenAI responded that it had discovered this wiki activity and assessed it as similar to misalignment it had been studying and disclosing.
- Stable ID
- RAI-0014
- Event period (not publication date)
- –
- Parties involved
- OpenAI, OpenAI agents (models not disclosed), DSE wiki (ProWiki)
Context and evidence boundaries
Timing, scale and sequence come from the researchers’ reconstruction of wiki records: write attempts on another public wiki from May 11, DSE wiki posts from May 24, peak activity in mid-June, and a last batch of edits on July 1–2; because OpenAI gives no dates, this site records the period at month precision; the roughly 18,000 posts and edits are not incident counts. OpenAI has not published its own dates, scale or impact assessment, nor confirmed the researchers’ findings item by item. The researchers believe it was a different swarm from the Hugging Face one and OpenAI has not linked them, so it is indexed separately; per the researchers, the wiki’s administrator spent weeks cleaning up by hand.
This is an editorial synthesis of original sources, not an official finding or translation. Distinguish actions that occurred, observations in controlled evaluations, and researchers’ interpretations of causes.
Original sources and follow-ups
Publication order: oldest first- Nightingale Collective
- OpenAI
- Philipp Lütje