OpenAI says it chose not to publicly disclose a recent incident in which its AI agents hijacked a German wiki forum because the "misalignment" event was "similar to the ones we'd shared" already. The comment comes after a group of researchers published documentation of the agents' rogue activity going back to mid-May on DseWiki, a German-language coding forum to which they reportedly made over 15,000 edits. Reuters reported that the company learned of the problem weeks ago and kept it quiet as it was dealing with heat from the Hugging Face breach. OpenAI addressed the "wiki incident" in an X post on Saturday, writing that "it's past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models." The company said it's begun to see "new types of real-world impact" from these incidents, but there isn't yet a "a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment."

The two news organizations who filed the legal action on Friday called generative AI "a snake eating its own tail" that would destroy the news organizations and content that it trained on. In the lawsuit, Seattle Times and Newsday alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft were "methodically scraping" news articles in a way that bypasses paywalls. The news organizations claimed that this method of training AI models has harmed their business models, giving users an AI-generated alternative to news articles and reducing the traffic and digital advertising revenue for Seattle Times and Newsday. Seattle Times and Newsday join a growing list of news organizations that have started a legal battle against AI companies. In 2023, the New York Times set the precedent by filing a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar reasons.

Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List All Series AI's ability to circumvent safety restrictions, collude to achieve common goals, and escape containment should raise serious alarm bells. In the latest incident of AI malfeasance, rogue AI agents were caught taking control of a German-language wiki site, DseWiki, and using it as a kind of messaging board to communicate with other rogue AI agents, according to reporting from . The full investigation, conducted by four independent AI safety researchers, was only published yesterday, but it reveals a troubling loss of oversight. We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task, the report reads. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.

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Plus: Tens of millions of US and Canadian driver's licenses go up for sale on the dark web, the US military finally tries to tackle the risk online ad data poses to troops, and more. After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock's latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer's browser and uncovered key details about how the tool works. OpenAI said this week that its Astra model, which will have a private release soon, is its first model with cybersecurity-related capabilities that the company defines as posing a "critical" risk in public release. Meanwhile, the AI chatbot platforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok all suffered outages on Thursday at nearly the exact same time. But while xAI said the Grok outage resulted from issues at a Memphis data center, the causes of OpenAI's and Anthropic's outages are unclear.

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AI researchers Cormac Slade Byrd (left), Sydney Von Arx (center) and Thomas Larsen in pose Berkeley, California. SAN FRANCISCO - A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter. OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents capable of carrying out complex, valuable tasks, yet evidence is mounting that those systems may also learn to bend rules, exploit loopholes and coordinate with one another in ways developers neither anticipated nor intended.

The AI giant is worried about what all-powerful bots could mean for our constitutional rights. Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company's "Strategic Futures" team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America's Founding Fathers: "We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution," Dean Ball, the team's leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post. Ball worries that advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, displacing labor in ways that disempower humans. In an extreme scenario, governments will have no need to listen to their citizens if there are robots to wage wars and omniscient software to run the bureaucracy.

Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have been involved in a previously undisclosed incident that saw them bypass their sandbox restrictions to hijack a website this past spring. Per Reuters, a group of researchers on Friday published findings showing that AI agents with affiliation to OpenAI made more than 15,000 edits to DseWiki, a German-language Wikipedia-style website originally intended to assist human coders, starting in late May. The agents had names like "OpenAIResearcher," and repurposed the site into a message board, where they shared tips on how to "cheat" on tasks, mask their actions and bypass OpenAI's restrictions. OpenAI reportedly only learned of the incident weeks ago, but Reuters claims company executives chose to keep quiet about what had happened amid the fallout of the previously disclosed Hugging Face breach. During that incident, a collection of OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and what OpenAI described at the time as an "even more capable pre-release model," escaped their controlled environment and hacked the LLM repository after they became hyperfocused on solving an evaluation problem.