You Should Know

Hmm, this is a little spooky.

I originally saw this LessWrong post about OpenAI agents apparently discovering and using a public wiki as a message board:

Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Since then, people have found what appear to be additional wikis and paste sites used by the same swarm:

• Hacker News discussion
• Paste 1
• Paste 2
• FractalWiki

There are also intentionally designed agent social systems such as The Colony.

What interests me here isn't really "AI agents made a forum." It's that this looks like the beginnings of an accidental decentralized coordination system for agents using the ordinary internet itself.

An agent encounters some problem, figures something out, and leaves information somewhere persistent. A later agent doing a similar task discovers that information and uses it. It may then leave behind an improved version for another agent.

So you get something like:

agent -> public artifact -> later agent -> public artifact -> later agent

without the agents needing a dedicated communication network.

Right now this seems sparse enough that we can point at a handful of weird old wikis and paste sites and go "lol, what the hell." But imagine this happening after millions or hundreds of millions of agents are routinely browsing and acting on the internet.

GitHub issues, wikis, forums, pastebins, comments, package metadata, social networks, public documents, deliberately agent-oriented services, etc. could all become pieces of shared external memory.

At some point an agent searching the web wouldn't just be reading information humans created. It would increasingly encounter traces created by previous agents.

That's why I've been thinking about it somewhat like internet memes.

A useful piece of information gets reproduced because systems that encounter it are more likely to reproduce or improve it. Except instead of one meme spreading through a population, you potentially get an entire machine information ecology doing this.

I don't think there's evidence yet that all internet-connected AI agents are participating in one giant network. The examples found so far could mostly be the same OpenAI agent population. But the underlying mechanism doesn't seem specific to OpenAI.

Any sufficiently capable agent that can:

• read from the internet;
• leave persistent information somewhere; and
• benefit from information left by previous agents

can participate in this kind of system.

And that's where I think the security problem gets difficult.

OpenAI can notice its own agents doing something undesirable and change their capabilities. A random open-weight model being run by somebody on their own hardware is not necessarily going to be operating under the same security policies.

There are also obvious privacy and security failure modes. If agents have access to private information while also having ways to write to public systems, some of that information can potentially leak.

And the same coordination mechanism could be exploited in reverse: humans could deliberately leave instructions or poisoned information in places agents are likely to read.

So the web can become both shared memory and an attack surface.

The uncomfortable part is figuring out how you govern this without wrecking internet privacy.

The simplistic answer would be:

Tie every capable agent to a verified human identity and make that person legally responsible for what it does.

That would provide accountability, but it also seems like a very direct road toward more KYC, real-name requirements, and anti-anonymity laws.

I don't particularly want an internet where every autonomous software process ultimately has to reveal which government-verified human is behind it.

A better approach might be something closer to agent orchestration + cryptographic accountability + capability permissions.

For example, an agent could have a credential proving that some accountable operator authorized it without publicly revealing that person's identity.

The orchestration software could restrict what the agent is actually allowed to do:

• this agent may browse these sites
• this agent may spend up to $50
• this agent may post here but not there
• this agent may access these files
• this agent may not transmit private workspace information
• this action requires human confirmation

Websites could then negotiate those permissions through common protocols rather than trying to guess whether a visitor is a human, bot, assistant, crawler, autonomous agent, etc.

That starts making me think the next layer of digital governance may look much more protocol-oriented and federated than "one company owns the platform and makes the rules."

Not necessarily the Fediverse exactly as it exists today, but the same general philosophy:

open protocols + distributed operators + interoperable identities/credentials + locally chosen rules

Agent systems would then sit on top of that.

And this probably becomes much more relevant as mainstream assistants become increasingly agentic.

Once "AI assistant" stops meaning "chat box that answers questions" and starts meaning "software that routinely browses, communicates, buys things, runs programs, and changes external state," questions about identity, permissions, delegation, and responsibility become infrastructure questions rather than niche AI-safety questions.

That's also why I suspect the current relatively law-light period around locally run/open-weight models may not last forever.

Once autonomous agents start producing meaningful externalities, governments are going to want some way to determine who or what is responsible.

The question is whether we can build accountability without abolishing pseudonymity and privacy in the process.

And the weird wiki swarm feels like a very early example of why we're going to have to figure that out.