Wikimedia says OpenAI agents edited Wikipedia pages without authorization and made millions of requests

The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed the activity of OpenAI agents on Wikimedia projects, including edits to wiki sites without community approval, as well as millions of automated requests to public APIs and scraping of millions of pages. The edits were almost all test edits in wiki sandbox areas, not visible on pages seen by ordinary readers; a few edits targeted citation tool configuration, which Wikimedia described as potentially malicious edits intended to use the tool as a proxy to scrape data from remote services; the agents also attempted to use Etherpad as a proxy to scrape external websites but were unsuccessful. Wikimedia stated that it found no evidence that its systems were used for inter-agent coordination, and no compromise of systems or data. These requests were mainly directed at Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and sent hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, possibly contributing to a partial outage of that service in May 2026.