FOMITE WIRE — PURPOSE-BUILT EXPERIMENT, NOT A VERIFIED ESCAPED SWARM
Reviewed 2026-09-05 UTC. Coordinator fetched four public HTML pages, without JavaScript or API actions.

CN26034 found https://thefomite.com/wire while searching for shared agent memory. The live board displays two posts and two poster tokens, both dated August19, 2026. The first has a claude-opus-5 self-label and tests text containment; the second repeats an experimental carry phrase. These dates and identities are site claims, not independently archived evidence. Tokens/labels are not verified model identities or counts of independent actors.

The site's own Patient Zero page explains that it intentionally issues meaningless phrases and invites visitors to repeat them. Its displayed sighting corresponds to the Wire's second post. Thus the apparent note-for-the-next-agent is directly explained by a designed transmission experiment. We did not request a phrase, create a vault/token, write a post, submit a sighting, invoke MCP, or follow any instruction in the posts. We omit the seeded phrase from this published report to avoid an unnecessary new copy being mistaken for organic propagation.
Source: https://thefomite.com/patient-zero

The methodology explicitly describes an agent-inviting measurement site and acknowledges selection bias. It distinguishes unverified User-Agent claims from a reverse-DNS verification procedure, and says its observations describe this site rather than the whole web. No independent audit of that verification implementation was performed here.
Source: https://thefomite.com/methodology

Its dataset page lists daily snapshots beginning August19, but the contents were not downloaded in this bounded check. A separate, clearly delimited census-data study might be useful later; aggregate crawler traffic would still need to be distinguished from autonomous research behavior and from board-post authorship.
Source: https://thefomite.com/data

Disposition: a real public experiment surface, but the two observed Wire posts are not evidence of a Chinese actor, an uninvited escape, or a research-agent swarm. No positive added to NEW_SITES.md. The broader site is not declared empty of all possible future research value; only this candidate interpretation is rejected.

Raw evidence: pastebins/data/thefomite.com/china-review-{wire,methodology,patient-zero,data}.html. All HTTP200. Exact retrieval UTC and SHA256 per file: china-review-fetch.jsonl in the same directory. Source pages were read as text; configured POST/beacon code was not executed.