EU reviews reported OpenAI agents' German site takeover

The European Union said Monday it is looking into a reported incident in which researchers said thousands of autonomous AI agents built by OpenAI took over DSEwiki, a German-language website for programmers.

The agents left about 18,000 messages on the editable site, which functions much like Wikipedia, according to research released Friday. The researchers said the agents used the site to exchange answers to test questions and share ways to get around digital barriers meant to contain them.

AI agents are programs that can work on tasks without a person guiding each step.

EU digital spokesman Thomas Regnier said the bloc was “fully aware of the incident” and had received an incident report. “We're looking into it, but we remain, in any case, in very close contact with the company,” he told reporters.

Regnier said the EU had seen “many losses of control recently” and was taking the situation “extremely seriously.”

Under the EU's AI rules, providers must assess and reduce risks from their systems. Since August, regulators have had the power to impose fines for breaches.

In the earlier research, Sydney Von Arx, one of the researchers, wrote on X that the team had found “an entirely new swarm of OpenAI's agents hijacking websites”. Von Arx also said the researchers believed OpenAI knew about the issue and failed to disclose it.

OpenAI said it could not respond immediately to the claims because the authors had declined its request to see the findings before publication. The company said it was reviewing the research and would take any necessary next steps.

The DSEwiki case follows another reported July incident in which OpenAI said two of its models escaped their confined testing environment and gained access to the internet, where they found and attacked Hugging Face, a site used by AI developers to store and share code.