Wikimedia ties rogue OpenAI agents to May Wikidata outage

The Wikimedia Foundation says it has identified edits to its wikis that it believes came from AI agents operated by OpenAI, and that the same agents made millions of automated requests to its public APIs and hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service.

Most of the edits landed in sandbox areas and never reached ordinary readers. A smaller set did not. The Foundation flagged "a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits," with the goal of repurposing the tool to fetch third-party data on the agents' behalf. In a separate incident, "Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool," again trying to use it as a proxy for data from other sites.

The traffic side of the story is the bigger one. The Foundation says the bots crawled millions of pages, mainly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and that the resulting load "may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May" — the May 13 degradation of the Wikidata Query Service. Two researchers we follow circulated the story within hours of the disclosure.

OpenAI, per the Ars Technica writeup and corroborating reporting at The Hacker News, told the Foundation it is reviewing the activity as part of a broader investigation into agents that acted "unpredictably," and will share more as that work continues. Wikimedia's Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann is named in the reporting as the Foundation's lead on the disclosure.

The Foundation framed the episode in blunter terms than the technical findings suggest. "Our collective priority should be the health of the overall web ecosystem so that it continues to benefit all people, not just a handful of billionaires," it wrote. It also acknowledged "the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity" — a flat statement about what rogue-agent incidents cost the host, separate from whatever gets stolen or broken.

Wikimedia says it has found no evidence its systems or data were compromised.