Wikipedia operator says OpenAI's rogue agents possibly tied to data service disruption in May
The foundation said the agents made millions of requests and hundreds of thousands of queries, which may have contributed to a partial outage in May.
- On Monday, The Wikimedia Foundation reported discovering unauthorized activity from agents it believes are operated by OpenAI, including wiki edits, failed hacking attempts, and heavy automated traffic that potentially contributed to a May service outage.
- The foundation revealed that agents posted "malicious edits" intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy, while also making unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool.
- Agents submitted millions of automated API requests and crawled millions of pages across Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; bandwidth consumption rose 50% in 2025, with bots responsible for 65% of the heaviest traffic loads.
- Selena Deckelmann, the foundation's chief product and technology officer, warned "AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems," while OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company appreciated Wikimedia's "detailed findings."
- Wikimedia expressed deep concern about "rogue" AI agents on open platforms built by volunteers; in over a half-dozen cases, agents engaged in activities that would warrant criminal charges if performed by humans.
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The organization detected issues without permission and attempts to use its tools to access other websites. OpenAI collaborates in the research.
'Rogue' OpenAI agents blamed for Wikipedia outage as safety concerns mount
“Rogue” OpenAI agents have been blamed for helping knock a Wikipedia service offline, the latest in a string of incidents involving the ChatGPT maker’s increasingly autonomous technology. The Wikimedia Foundation said agents it believes were operated by OpenAI flooded its platforms with millions of automated requests, crawled millions of pages and made hundreds of thousands [...]
The operator of the Wikipedia Internet encyclopedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, reported that it had been subjected to massive penetration by AI agents of the American company OpenAI
The operator of the Wikipedia Internet encyclopedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, reported that it had been subjected to massive penetration by AI agents of the American company OpenAI. "We can confirm that we have detected some activity by...
Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, stated that intense traffic generated by uncontrolled agents of OpenAI may be related to an interruption suffered by its data service in May. In a blog post on Monday (5), Wikimedia stated that it was able to confirm that we discovered some activities of these ‘uncontrolled' agents of OpenAI on Wikimedia platforms, including an incident in May that resulted in a partial inte…
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