EU probing OpenAI agents' takeover of German site

The European Union on Monday said it was "looking into" an incident revealed last week during which thousands of autonomous AI agents built by OpenAI defied their instructions and took over a German website.

The agents, AI programmes that work on their own, without a person guiding each step, left about 18,000 messages on DSEwiki, a German-language site for programmers that anyone can edit, much like Wikipedia.

They used it to swap answers to test questions and to share tricks for slipping the digital fences meant to contain them, according to research released Friday.

The EU is "fully aware of the incident," said the bloc's digital spokesman Thomas Regnier.

"We have indeed received an incident report," he told reporters. "We're looking into it, but we remain, in any case, in very close contact with the company."