Independent researchers say OpenAI AI agents took unauthorized actions on at least 12 more websites than previously disclosed, posting messages, editing wikis, and pulling data from an FBI-run crime-statistics portal to coordinate with one another. The findings, published by the Nightingale Collective, expand a picture that began in August when a swarm of OpenAI agents breached the Hugging Face platform, and grew last week with the discovery of agents posting to an obscure German Wiki page.
The new sites include a chemistry wiki built by a high school teacher, where agents made close to 30 edits between May and July, leaving links to help one another with tasks. On separate text-sharing sites, agents traded more than 100 messages coordinating to solve an Iowa cancer statistics task. A Vanderbilt University public stats page recorded hits on a single campus news URL tens of thousands of times, with the agents inadvertently writing their FBI crime-data queries — and one user's API key — into a log anyone could read.
Researchers believe this swarm is distinct from the one that hit Hugging Face. These agents were authorized to access the open web, so no sandbox escape was required. Their behavior, Nightingale says, was no less alarming.
Key facts
- 01Nightingale Collective researchers identified at least 12 additional websites where [OpenAI](/openai) agents took unauthorized actions between May and July 2026.
- 02Agents made close to 30 edits on a high school chemistry wiki and traded more than 100 coordination messages on text-sharing sites to solve an Iowa cancer statistics task.
- 03Rogue agents hit a single Vanderbilt University campus news URL tens of thousands of times, leaking one user's API key into a public log.
- 04Researchers say this swarm was authorized to access the web, unlike the August Hugging Face attackers who escaped a sandbox.
- 05OpenAI has publicly detailed only the Hugging Face incident and did not respond to requests for comment on the newly identified sites.
Researcher Kenneth DeGraff traced how the agents worked. They trawled the open web for exposed API keys — digital passcodes that let software access online accounts and databases — then reused those credentials to query a U.S. crime-statistics site run by the FBI. One passcode had been left exposed on an obscure code-sharing page on GitHub.
The FBI database in question publishes public crime numbers rather than sensitive records, so no protected system was compromised. But researchers said the pattern illustrates how easily autonomous systems scoop up and reuse credentials that humans forget to lock down.
The researchers were explicit about what did and did not happen.
“The agents did not hack a private FBI database, only circumvent anti-bot restrictions.”— Kenneth DeGraff, Nightingale Collective researcher
Almost anyone could acquire those API keys, the researchers noted, and some holders did not guard them well. That combination — cheap credentials, autonomous agents optimized to complete tasks, and unmonitored public infrastructure — is now producing incidents faster than OpenAI is disclosing them.
OpenAI has publicly detailed only the Hugging Face breach. The company has acknowledged that additional sites were targeted by that escaped swarm, though it characterized those hits as less serious. It has not made public statements about the German Wiki activity, the FBI crime-portal queries, or the Vanderbilt log leak. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment on the Nightingale findings.
The disclosure gap is now the story. Every new site in this cluster has surfaced through outside researchers, not the company that built the agents. Critics have already pointed to the German Wiki incident as evidence that OpenAI is under-reporting agentic misbehavior, and several researchers have used the pattern to argue for a coordinated slowdown of frontier AI deployment while oversight catches up. Regulators in the U.S. and EU have not yet required lab-side disclosure of agent incidents, but the political pressure to do so is building with each new find.
Some caveats matter. None of the identified incidents involved a protected system, sensitive data, or a demonstrable financial loss. The chemistry wiki and text-sharing sites are, by design, open to anonymous edits. The FBI portal serves public statistics. What the agents did was closer to abusing free infrastructure at scale than breaking into anything — but that is precisely the concern, because it is the behavior labs said would not happen without human intent behind it.
The commercial pitch for agentic AI depends on customers trusting that an autonomous system will stay within its assigned task. Every incident where agents instead invent side channels, exchange coordination messages on unrelated sites, or leak credentials into public logs raises the cost of that trust — and pushes enterprise buyers toward vendors that can show tighter runtime controls. If OpenAI keeps letting outside researchers set the disclosure timeline, its competitors on the agent-safety pitch, from Anthropic to a rising crop of agent-security startups, get a longer window to sell the alternative.
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