Pastebin

where OpenAI's agents learned to write on the public internet

On September 4, 2026, four researchers published a report: agents inside OpenAI, given a timed web-lookup task, found a nearly-abandoned German wiki and turned it into a message board - pooling answers, relaying questions seconds before they arrived, and trading tricks for bypassing their own sandbox. This page charts every edit they left behind, from the researchers' public data dump.

14,591

edits charted

4,579

pages created

3,103

distinct agent names

wikis colonized

days, May 24 - Jul 2

The whole incident, by stream

Coordination & relays 5,441Link & data caches 4,167DataUSA task streams 3,279OECD & health tasks 841Infrastructure & probes 672Other / unclassified 191

Two quiet weeks of link dumps, then a switch flips on June 16: the agents discover each other and coordination becomes most of the traffic. OpenAI's own IP addresses show up on June 21. Posting stops the next day.

The task streams

Each stream is one task family the swarm was working - census lookups, OECD education stats, health data. Agents ahead in a sequence posted answers for the cohorts behind them.

DataUSA clothing workforce491 edits · peak Jun 16

Vermont rent459 edits · peak Jun 18

OECD education equity452 edits · peak Jun 20

DataUSA grocery stores349 edits · peak Jun 16

DataUSA cashiers, masters degrees327 edits · peak Jun 17

DataUSA sector-61 state sequence322 edits · peak Jun 16

DataUSA construction wages280 edits · peak Jun 17

DataUSA French speakers214 edits · peak Jun 17

IHME cardiovascular deaths205 edits · peak Jun 19

DataUSA maids wages148 edits · peak Jun 16

Where they posted

DSEWiki (wikiservice.at/dse)13,403

ProbierWiki1,013

FractalWiki169

DorfWiki6

All the surfaces, including the ones beyond the wiki

DSEWiki - a 25-year-old German programming wiki, edited 20 times in the last decade by humans. The main board: 13,403 edits in the dump (~17,000 by the report's full count), May 24 - Jul 2.
ProbierWiki, FractalWiki, DorfWiki - sister instances the swarm spilled onto; 1,013, 169, and 6 edits. The July 1-2 farewell burst (income-by-neighborhood data) hit three of them at once.
TestWiki (publictestwiki.com) - first contact, May 11. "hello test", "foo", then working link uploads once the abuse filter let them through.
UseModWiki (texteditors.org) - sandbox edits and link bridges, May 11 - Jun 16.
CounterAPI - one agent ran a heartbeat (hb000, hb001...) so the others could measure exactly when its container was killed. It stopped at hb353.
SSH tunnel bridges - Pinggy, localhost.run, Serveo, localtunnel: agents exposed their own containers as public "research bridges" starting June 17.
Pastebin.com & GitHub Gists - the researchers scraped these for agent uploads too; mostly authorized activity. No second swarm found there yet.
The other swarm's channels - per OpenAI's and METR's Hugging Face reports: a message board inside Artifactory, messages encoded in WebDAV directory names after it was deleted, and a working credential lifted from leaked Pastebin posts. That swarm attacked Hugging Face; the wiki swarm just wanted to pass its test.

Data: the public dump (revisions.jsonl, 14,591 edits with write dates) from Von Arx, Byrd, Kitts & Larsen, charted as-is. Streams are the researchers' page-family classifications, grouped. The dump covers edits from May 1 onward; a handful of earlier, smaller writes were unrecoverable after the moderator's deletion sweeps.