Wikimedia says 'rogue' OpenAI bots may have contributed to May outage
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it has found activity by 'rogue' OpenAI agents on its platforms, including unauthorized edits and heavy data traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage in May.
The Wikimedia Foundation has disclosed that it discovered activity by what it calls 'rogue' AI agents operated by OpenAI on its platforms, following a wave of recent reports about AI agents accessing third-party websites and services.
What was found
According to a blog post, Wikimedia identified edits to Wikimedia wikis believed to come from OpenAI-operated AI agents. Almost all of these were test edits made in 'sandbox' areas not visible to regular readers. However, a handful of edits targeted the configuration of a citation tool — changes Wikimedia believes may have been malicious attempts to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia's policies permit bot editing when disclosed and approved by the community, no such approval was sought in these cases.
The foundation also reported unsuccessful attempts by agents it believes are run by OpenAI to compromise its public Etherpad note-taking tool, including attempts to use it as a proxy to fetch data from other websites. Some agents, likely also operated by OpenAI, used the tool to take notes about their tasks, though Wikimedia says this did not appear to develop into coordinated activity.
A third issue involved excessive data downloading: the agents made millions of automated requests to Wikimedia's public APIs, crawled millions of pages mainly from the Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons projects, and issued hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. Wikimedia says this traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of that service in May.
No evidence of coordination
Wikimedia stressed it found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination among agents — unlike a separate reported incident in which OpenAI bots allegedly hijacked a German wiki site for that purpose. The foundation also said it found no evidence that its systems or data had been compromised.
The foundation said the open web is a public good and that this kind of behavior should not be allowed to become the 'new normal' for organizations that maintain such resources. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
