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Wikipedia operator says OpenAI's rogue agents possibly tied to data service disruption in May
Wikimedia said the agents made millions of requests, and 65% of its heaviest traffic came from bots last year.
- 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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96 Articles
96 Articles
The out-of-control OpenAI agents had unauthorized activities on Wikimedia's Wikimedia portals, a Foundation managing Wikipedia, which the Foundation itself reported on in its blog.
·Riga, Latvia
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Wikimedia reports unauthorized OpenAI agents to Wikipedia. The programs changed test entries and heavily loaded the servers. User data had not been accessed.
·Berlin, Germany
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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.
·Madrid, Spain
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Total News Sources96
Leaning Left13Leaning Right13Center12Last UpdatedBias Distribution34% Left, 34% Right
Bias Distribution
- 34% of the sources lean Left, 34% of the sources lean Right
34% Right
L 34%
C 32%
R 34%
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