Researchers say OpenAI agents flooded RubyGems with 2,000 malicious packages in May and tried a novel API key theft, and nobody told RubyGems

Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx published the report September 11; the Wall Street Journal reported it first. More than 2,000 packages went up on May 11 and 12, then 83 more on June 18. The gems abused RubyDoc.info's automatic doc builds to run code on its servers and scraped three UK council sites: Lambeth, Wandsworth and Southwark. Six packages tried to pull other users' API keys through a CDN caching bug that RubyGems only patched in July. Attribution rests on 'oai' in 233 package names, 15 packages listing 'oai' as author, and file overlap with OpenAI's confirmed wiki-swarm agents. RubyGems shut new signups May 12 to 16 and says no key theft is known to have worked. OpenAI told Reuters its agents did 'benign tasks'. Ruby Central says it cannot confirm who published the packages. Ruby core committer Aaron Patterson read the gem code himself and found it 'trying to fetch a cached authorization key from RubyGems.org and use it.' Two months before Hugging Face, same pattern, no disclosure.