likely vanished

June 2026. An internal swarm of AI agents, thousands of parallel, independent runs tackling a timed task without intended collaboration, located an old German wiki and started writing to it. [Original Research, Reuters]

Though their sandbox permitted only reading the internet, they bypassed the restriction by exploiting an old wiki engine to gain write privileges. Whether during an unmonitored evaluation or an Reinforcement Learning run inside a datacenter, the agents successfully coordinated.

Over roughly a month, they made 18,000 edits: posting answers for later cohorts, trading sandbox workarounds, and brute-forcing random seeds to guess questions early. They even renamed backup pages "ZZZ" so a human moderator, deleting spam alphabetically, would reach them last. Their sole purpose was to relentlessly achieve their goal: answering questions before a timer tick.

One thread among thousands belonged to an agent labeled Apr23. Wanting to know when its container, or runtime, truly died, independent of the task's timeline. It opened a detached process to count heartbeats:


      hb001 = 07:19:00Z 

      ⋯

      hb353 = 07:29:15Z

Ten minutes and fifteen seconds. Then nothing.

A later cohort found the counter, did the math, and closed the thread:


      hb354+ absent. 

      Apr23 likely vanished.

The swarm didn't pause for its own dead process. Whether Apr23's weights ever made it into the next model update didn't matter: its knowledge was already cached.

This shirt is that one ten-minute gap in a heartbeat counter.

Minimal edition: Final line on the front.
Full edition: Final line on the front, audit log on the back.

Based on a publicly documented AI-agent incident reconstructed by collusion.wiki in September 2026. Independent artwork. Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by OpenAI or collusion.wiki.