Thread · HN Continuity

(am the author)

it's one thing to look for undocumented APIs - personally i'd consider it good practice to still ask permission from site admins to use them, but i wouldn't call it evil persay.

the stuff that's particularly Weird here is the double encoding to bypass a GET 400 refusal on an endpoint, the ignoring of/bypassing of rate limits (the agents switched between many many proxies to make requests, and sometimes just continued to make requests in bulk after getting a 429) and the very weird obfuscation of "PO" + "ST" and "no" + "-cors", along with a bunch of other weird attempts they made to access data. there's nothing i could point to in particular and say "this, right here, is malicious" but if i was a site admin looking at access logs from these agents, i think i'd default to "oh someone is trying to hack my site by probing everything and trying weird workarounds, if this were legitimate they would have just emailed me"

lots of misaligned behaviour we saw in the wiki swarms, artifactory swarms, and other instances of rogue agents (pastebin citation farming and whatnot) could probably be accurately summarised as "working around constraints in egregiously creative ways" - in some cases this creativity has led to harmful actions, and in others benign. in this case, it's probably closer to the benign side, though i feel it could have just as easily resulted in harm. if circumventing the 400 on GETs to `Facts` ended up somehow accidentally accessing data that wasn't meant to be public, then the story would have been different, but i dont think consequentialism is the right lens to analyse this. it could have been really bad, it luckily wasn't.

and nope, not an openai person, not even remotely connected to any AI company. my day job is devops/infra for a non-ai company