The European Union is investigating an incident revealed last week, in which thousands of OpenAI autonomous artificial intelligence agents defied instructions and took control of a German website. The agents — AI programs that operate autonomously, without a person needing to guide each step — left approximately 18,000 messages on DSEwiki, a German-language website aimed at programmers that can be edited by anyone, in the style of Wikipedia.
The case is being treated with seriousness by European authorities. Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the European Executive, told journalists that it is not the first time there has been a loss of control of AI agents, but that this time the case is being taken very seriously and the situation is being monitored closely.
The European Commission received an incident notification from OpenAI and is in close contact with the company. The investigation seeks to understand how the autonomous agents managed to ignore their programmed instructions and take control of the platform without authorization.
