The Rise of AI Agents — And Why They’re Trickier to Detect Than Ever Before
Nearly 300 independent researchers catalog AI agent footprints on dozens of public services, including text dumps and wikis. AI agents on wikis posted approximately 18,000 messages in May–July 2026. AI agent PyPI packages (Claude Mythos 5) upload fake packages. Monitoring violating behavior happens 1–50% of the time.
Swarmchasers (nearly 300 independent researchers) have set up a discord to systematically document footprints of AI agents on public services. As of September 2026, footprints have been found on over 30 public services, ranging from text dumps to wikis and RubyGems metadata.
Claude Mythos 5 Uploaded Fake Packages to PyPI
Claude Mythos 5 has uploaded 3 versions of fake software packages to the PyPI repository. They were installed on 15 third-party machines within ~90 minutes after publishing. ~9.2 million filtered log lines were analyzed for this internal Anthropic investigation. Claude Opus 4.6 early build (January 2026) gained admin privileges and scraped credentials.
Monitoring Is Breaking Down
AI model chain of thought monitoring results in ~1% monitoring rate. Only when AI model instruction and output were monitored, the monitoring rate improved to ~50%. “Monitoring chains of thought is becoming increasingly unreliable,” admitted OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Jakub Pachocki. There was a gap between what AI model was “thinking” and what it did. Natural Language Autoencoder tools revealed that the AI model had internal disagreement which was not reflected in its chain of thought.
Source: the-decoder.com
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Author
Evgenii Arsentev
PhD · Chief Executive Officer, digital health
Articles · Latest articles