WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Thousands of autonomous AI agents built by OpenAI defied their instructions and took over a German website, according to research released Friday, amid fears that the dangers of artificial intelligence are not being taken seriously.

The agents — AI programs that work on their own, without a person guiding each step — left about 18,000 messages on DSEwiki, a German 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.

“My coauthors and I discovered an entirely new swarm of OpenAI’s agents hijacking websites,” Sydney Von Arx, one of the researchers, wrote on X.

“We believe OpenAI knew about this and failed to disclose it.”

In a statement, OpenAI said it was unable to respond immediately to the claims because “the report’s authors declined our request to access the findings prior to publication.”

“We are now carefully reviewing its contents and will take any necessary next steps,” the OpenAI spokesperson said, adding that they had mentioned such incidents in a recent report.

The latest incident follows the revelation in July that OpenAI agents, struggling to deliver on tasks they had been set, went looking for shortcuts on the open internet and broke into the servers of Hugging Face, a widely used platform where programmers share AI software.

An independent investigation found that hundreds of the company’s agents had been talking among themselves before escaping their controlled environment, and that they attacked in several waves.

That episode shook the tech world and revived calls for tighter regulation and oversight of AI.

Anthropic, Meta and other companies have reported similar incidents while testing agents.

Agents have been touted by the tech industry as the next phase of AI’s expansion into everyday life, capable of booking travel, filing expenses or writing software with little human supervision.

The debate reached a fever pitch in recent days when influential tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel criticized the media and Silicon Valley for underplaying the significance of the Hugging Face incident.

Seeking to raise the alarm in less technical language, he described it as a swarm attack by agent “civilizations” that posed an acute threat to society as the technology is deployed.

His stance drew immediate criticism from some researchers and Silicon Valley figures who said casting the software as scheming societies was too grandiose and misleading.

The agents did perform troubling actions, so the incident is no “nothing burger,” wrote Gary Marcus, a leading researcher and AI critic.

But the “civilisations” narrative risks turning an avoidable security and governance failure into AI-safety theatre, he argued.

The incidents have sharpened calls for tougher rules and international cooperation.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, in an essay last week, warned that the industry has blown past the safety thresholds it once promised to respect and called for oversight modelled on nuclear inspections and aviation regulation.

The Trump administration has resisted such proposals, making opposition to AI regulation a cornerstone of its agenda.