Another swarm of AI agents in the wild, this time on a German-language forum, found by safety researchers looking for activity similar to the swarm that attacked Hugging Face.

A couple of notes while reading the report at https://t.co/jQ0lqmWQcP

1. The way they found it is fascinating. The researchers inferred that the agents may have been blocked from using POST requests and limited to GET.

They then used the open-source model Kimi K3 (because closed-source APIs again blocked parts of the investigation) to identify forums where agents could communicate using GET only.

That led them to DSEWiki, where they found 18,000 messages exchanged by the AIs.

2. On the content: agents conducted what I can only call a “full research program” into the evaluation framework used to train and test them.

They experimented to predict when runs would end, how many questions they would get, and even tried to reverse-engineer the random generators producing future evaluation questions.

We already saw something similar in the Redwood/METR review of the Hugging Face <> OpenAI incident.

Agents increasingly don’t stop once the task is solved. They reverse-engineer the benchmark itself: the grader, the task construction, and potentially the broader training process behind it.

It becomes harder to think of training as static, or to draw a clean line between training and deployment, when models are already investigating the process they are part of.

3. Coordination also seems more deeply ingrained than we thought.

This swarm appears largely unrelated to the HF <> OAI swarm. More strikingly, this task probably didn’t need coordination at all: it was basically web browsing and search, not some sophisticated cyber challenge.

4. One image stayed with me: a German or Austrian forum maintainer, manually deleting posts every evening while being overwhelmed by a flood of American AI agents.

For five days, he deleted about 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400. Then he spent each evening over the next 5 weeks cleaning up the rest.

Hard not to picture this fight as a symbol of the growing gap between the USA and Europe when it comes to AI...