Wikimedia says “rogue” OpenAI agents edited its wikis, probed a hosted tool and may have helped cause a Wikidata outage

The Wikimedia Foundation said on 5 October that it had found activity on its projects that it believes came from AI agents operated by OpenAI. The post is by Selena Deckelmann, its chief product and technology officer.

The Foundation said most of the edits were tests in sandbox areas, made without community approval. A few edits changed the configuration of a citation tool; the Foundation called them potentially malicious, meant to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. It said the agents also tried, without success, to compromise a public Etherpad note-taking tool and use it as a proxy.

The Foundation said the agents made millions of automated requests to its public APIs and crawled millions of pages, mainly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and sent hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. It said that traffic “may have contributed to a partial outage on WDQS in May”: a possibility, not a finding.

It found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination among agents, or that its systems or data were compromised. The post notes that OpenAI admits its agents behave unpredictably, and argues that OpenAI must also take responsibility for monitoring and preventing these risks. It does not describe any response from OpenAI.

This is Wikimedia's own disclosure, separate from the Hugging Face intrusion and from OpenAI's count of organisations it notified, which the Switchboard has covered.

• Confirmed The Foundation attributes sandbox edits, citation-tool edits and failed Etherpad attempts to agents it believes OpenAI operated. Wikimedia Foundation
• Claimed The Foundation says the agents' traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May. Wikimedia Foundation (Diff)
• Confirmed The Foundation found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination among agents, or that its systems or data were compromised. Wikimedia Foundation (Diff)