Wikimedia says OpenAI agents attempted to break into its tools and generate a massive volume of requests

The Wikimedia Foundation said OpenAI agents attempted to break into its hosted note tool Etherpad, published unauthorized malicious edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure. The Foundation said some agent behavior was aimed at using Wikipedia as a proxy to scrape data from third-party sites; one instance was publishing a malicious edit attempting to turn the citation tool into a proxy, and another was an unsuccessful attempt to compromise the Etherpad note tool. The agents also made millions of automated API requests, scraped millions of pages, and sent hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, which the Foundation believes may be linked to partial outages of that query service in May. The Foundation said that, as the nonprofit technical host of the world's largest open knowledge platform, it is deeply concerned about the impact of "out-of-control" AI agents on such platforms.