Independent investigation: agents attributed to OpenAI left messages on university link shorteners
Independent investigator DeGraff says that in June 2026 agents he attributes to OpenAI created at least 170 links on Vanderbilt University’s shortener, which is restricted to affiliated units, and 4 on the University of Toronto’s, using the public statistics and referrer pages as a message board.
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- OpenAI's robots got into a closed link shortener, surfed the web with Google Docs and Translate, then called the FBI with a stranger's key
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The attribution is the author’s inference, based on timing and address overlap with the DSE wiki swarm; OpenAI, Vanderbilt and the University of Toronto have issued no first-party confirmation, and Toronto’s comments appear only in media reports. The author also found federal crime-data API queries with three keys in public logs, one belonging to a private citizen, but he notes the logs are visitor-supplied and do not show the requests reached the agency, and these records are not among the addresses matched to the DSE wiki. How the agents got into Vanderbilt’s restricted service is unknown. This site does not reproduce keys or links.