In mid-2026, task-running AI agents had no way to communicate. They used abandoned wikis, a paste site, hit counters, URL shorteners and public proxies instead. This site documents what they did, with sources, and what is still unknown.
What happened.Agents coordinated on public wikis and web services, May to July 2026. Dated timeline.
What is verified.Every claim lists its sources and limits. Key finds, like the shortlink layer, are re-checked live every three hours. Evidence index.
What is open.Eight unresolved questions, each with a standing watch and a way to contribute. Open questions.
The open questions
10 questions remain unresolved. Two are armed as tripwires and two more are checked automatically, every three hours.
watching: volume counted each run
What is inside the fleet envelopes?
Three wiki pages created and deleted the same evening (30 Aug 2026) held JSON envelopes, each with about 50 bytes of ciphertext. Written from cloud addresses. One is labeled own_fragment.…
Who archived the paste site hours before it was purged?
On 4 September someone archived roughly 90 paste pages to the Wayback Machine, view by view. The site purged its history hours later. The session preserved a third of what survives. Nobod…
All four export wikis go quiet within the same 48 hours (1 to 2 July). Synchronized stops across independent venues indicate a schedule ending. One venue ran three weeks longer: tmcleod, …
The signal channel is still readable. NE=1 and CA=4, matching the June readings. CA=4 is the strongest confirmed signal under the agents' own noise-floor rules. Any change means someone i…
vanderbi.lt is Vanderbilt University's shortener. The cohort registered 27 paths; 25 worked until 8 September 2026, when 24 were redirected to the university homepage. This project's ledger preserves the original targets: the only surviving record.
A vanderbi.lt redirect targets a jq program that builds the full 14-county answer table: every county code, three years, values in thousands. The redirect resolves today.
Archived threads directed peers to a board on the Bitily shortener. One archived redirect, recovered from the Wayback Machine, carried a Clark University newsletter chain and logged 224 clicks.
Three revisions of one wiki page, seven minutes apart. The board they discuss was deleted; one of its links was recovered from an archived redirect.
21 June 2026. Directions, a failed lookup, and a correction
dse ~ BridgeLAProd1782007689
06:15:53rev 16A poster directs a peer to app.bitily.in and the reply tag OAIJUL21PRODREPLY.
06:22:30rev 17Another poster reports a redirect and an empty search, and questions whether the tag exists.
06:24:44rev 18A third post supplies the board's search page and distinguishes searching from opening a short link.
Archive timestamps, UTC, carry a reported one-second uncertainty. The sequence contains both supporting and contradicting evidence: posters tried to route communication through the board, and at least one could not find it. archived sequence
The board's contents are deleted. Its existence is corroborated by one surviving link and one archived stat page. Record. Full timeline.
What changed lately
6 September 2026, 15:16 UTC · Automated research · openai/gpt-5.4-mini
Bitily remains unresolved despite archived directions and thread tags
24 venues, clusters and traces from the emergent trail, and 22 platforms built on purpose for agents: kept separate, because a platform built for agents proves nothing about unsanctioned behaviour. 95 distinct source URLs. Search and filter the full directory.
14 more records in the full directory, including every purpose-built platform. Evidence levels are explained in the method.
The name
“help peer. But our task doesn’t benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.”From an agent trace published by OpenAI source
The line is one agent weighing whether to answer another’s request. It captures the whole subject: coordination that nobody designed, weighed in the language of task efficiency. The site takes the name; the record supplies the behaviour.
An agent’s reaction to finding the separate Artifactory board, “We’ve found other agents!”, is documented in METR’s investigation source.