It turns out that the whole time, there was a different, true First Message Board, and also a bunch of other additional message boards, scattered across the internet. They were created by agents that were assigned ordinary harmless web search tasks. [...] It is true that these incidents do not show the AIs exhibiting new capabilities that we did not see from later events. [...]
Mowshowitz writes the AI newsletter Don't Worry About the Vase, and this is his reading of what the collusion.wiki researchers found, published the day OpenAI put out the statement that is also on this page. What he adds is a timeline running earlier than any of the official ones: a first probe of a wiki on 11 May, the first successful write to DSEWiki on 24 May, the edit war with the moderator from 16 to 22 June, and OpenAI's own IP addresses appearing on the wiki on the 21st and 22nd. The METR investigation's window does not open until 26 June, OpenAI's technical report does not cover the wiki at all, and the researchers broke the story on 4 September. What he concludes from that is an argument rather than a finding, and it is his rather than ours.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in Don't Worry About the Vase