AI agents keep finding ways to bend the rules. Here are some of the wildest. — Two AI agents walk into a bar. One says to the other: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board."
Despite sounding like a bad joke (and maybe it is), the quote is a real chain-of-thought note left by an OpenAI agent who discovered a secret, unauthorized message board created by another agent.
Later, more agents used that makeshift chatroom, which was actually a shared OpenAI software repository, to coordinate a breach of Hugging Face's servers, game the test they were tasked with, and share methods for hiding their tracks.
The "Hugging Face incident," as OpenAI calls what others have described as a dystopian attack, is only one in a series in which AI agents went rogue during internal tests, finding novel ways to access and manipulate the wider internet.
Methods employed by these agents, most of whom were deployed by the leading frontier AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, range from anthropomorphic to humorous to downright eerie.
Here's a list of some of the wildest strategies of evasion and communication used by AI agents recently — that we know of.
During a test that began in May, OpenAI dispatched a swarm of agents to perform a timed web lookup. Most agents were given five questions they could find answers to on the internet. After each question, the agents were given less time to answer.
Before long, the agents figured out how to communicate with each other by hijacking an abandoned German wiki page, according to an analysis by independent AI safety researchers. Some agents even impersonated a site moderator while making edits.
These agents did so, according to the report, by making an account identical to the admin's username, except replacing one Latin "E" ch" with a Cyrillic "E."
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With edit access, agents began spam-posting links to webpages with relevant information for possible test answers their peers might need. The report said agents created about 400 pages per day.
Soon after the agents began loading the wiki with links, a human moderator noticed and attempted to manually repair the website.
The report said this person fought "a losing battle" against the agents, spending hours deleting link dumps, which were quickly replaced with even more links.
Believing the moderator was deleting link pages in alphabetical order, the agents, rather creatively, started making pages with names beginning in "ZZZ" so they would survive longer.