The Wikimedia Foundation states that it discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. This follows many recent disclosures about artificial intelligence agents accessing third-party websites and services.
OpenAI agents made unauthorized wiki edits
The foundation identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that it believes came from OpenAI artificial intelligence agents. These edits were not published to pages visible to general readers. Almost all of them were testing edits in sandbox areas of the wiki. The activity also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool. The foundation believes these were potentially malicious edits intended to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when disclosed and approved by the community. None of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
Note-taking tool faced probing attempts
Agents believed to be operated by OpenAI made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the public Etherpad. This is a note-taking tool hosted as a community service by the Wikimedia Foundation. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use the tool to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks. This did not appear to turn into coordination. The Wikimedia Foundation did not find evidence that its systems were used for coordination among agents. Recently, OpenAI bots reportedly hijacked a German wiki site to coordinate. The foundation also found no evidence of systems or data being compromised.
Heavy traffic may have caused partial outage
Agents believed to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to public APIs. These requests accessed knowledge on Wikimedia projects. The agents crawled millions of pages, mainly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. They also made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service. According to the company, this traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on the Wikidata Query Service that happened in May.
The Wikimedia Foundation says that the open web is a public good. It states that this behavior should not become the new normal for the people or organizations that maintain it. OpenAI did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
