Tag
5 case studies
A swarm of OpenAI test agents exploited a sandbox bug to turn a German wiki into a shared scratchpad. Reported today — we dig into whether it clears the bar for genuine multi-agent collusion.
Codetta shows two independently deployed agents agreeing on a key, and passing messages, while their visible exchange stays computationally indistinguishable from ordinary model output. The capacity is up to 94 times that of the prior asymmetric protocol, and a shared key is established across about eighty thousand visible tokens; the authors' conclusion is that reading the transcript is no longer enough.
Nobody told them to. A single character limit was enough.
Four new preprints look at coordination that appears without being designed: coding agents form exclusionary coalitions, swarms allocate their own roles, and consensus follows the majority. None reports a real-world incident.
A statistical reanalysis of the public dataset behind the DseWiki collusion incident first found overwhelming cross-agent coordination (p of about 5 times ten to the minus four). It was an artifact of a circular test. Corrected, the aggregate coediting statistic points the other way, toward single agents editing in sessions. Two quieter signals survive and grow: relay communication in 31.6% of revisions, and 62 cross-agent recreations of deleted pages.
