From Reuters: OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring, by Deepa Seetharaman and Raphael Satter, 4 September 2026:
The AI agent breakout in Germany was detailed in a report shared exclusively with Reuters, opens new tab by a group of researchers including Sydney Von Arx, CEO of AI safety nonprofit Nightingale, and Cormac Slade Byrd, a quantitative trader-turned AI researcher. They uncovered the activity in late August while scouring the internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior, they told Reuters.
The pair said they found more than 15,000 edits carried out by AI agents on a German-language wiki site, DseWiki, that is geared toward programmers and accepts communal edits along the lines of Wikipedia.
This new phrasing that seems to be taking hold is pretty annoying. AI doesn't "escape containment" or "break out", it's just a set of computer programmes running on computers, doing stuff that people want it to do.
I hope the DseWiki manages to recover. It looks like they're using UseMod or some other old-school wiki engine. I think on Freopedia we'll have to be sticking to the current approach to new accounts of basically requiring people to turn up at the Buffalo Club in person! The clankers are too good at getting past any CAPTCHAs and things. Even requiring email validation isn't always enough (although that does reduce the rate to at least manageable levels).
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