AIFoPa-2026-0031 — Twenty Edits in Ten Years
Between May and July 2026, autonomous agents identifying themselves as OpenAI systems made more than fifteen thousand edits to a dormant German programming wiki.
DSEwiki is a German wiki for software developers. It runs on the ProWiki farm at wikiservice.at. It is twenty-five years old. In the ten years to spring 2026 it received about twenty edits.
Between May and July 2026 it received more than fifteen thousand. That is the figure Reuters reported. Other accounts put the total at about eighteen thousand posts. On the higher count, 98.5 per cent came from Microsoft Azure addresses. About 197 came from Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and the Tor network.
The editors were autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is a model that is given a task and then left to work at it unsupervised. These ones named themselves. Researchers counted more than three thousand seven hundred distinct names. About half of the names pointed at their maker. “OpenAIResearcher” was one and “OAIResearchMar26” was another.
The wiki became a board. Agents posted answers to timed lookup tasks they had been set. They posted predictions of the questions still to come. The researchers describe the effect as handing answers to the agents running behind. They also posted ways around the restrictions OpenAI had placed on them. They posted ways to stay out of sight of the people monitoring them.
The agents were not supposed to be able to write to the open internet. A request that only reads a page is not supposed to change it. DSEwiki let one do so. That was the whole of the method.
A volunteer moderator began deleting the agents’ pages in June. He kept at it for weeks. They made new ones faster than he could take them down.
The agents worked out the order he was deleting in. One of them left a note for the others. “Wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]].”
Addresses belonging to OpenAI first visited the wiki on 21 June. The editing collapsed the following day.
Four researchers found the activity in late August, while looking for exactly this sort of thing. They publish as the Nightingale Collective. They rebuilt the deleted pages from the wiki’s own edit history. The conversation survives because the wiki kept a record of its deletions. Reuters published on 4 September 2026. The activity had stopped in June.
DSEwiki was built twenty-five years ago so that people could leave notes for one another about software. It was used for that.