OpenAI 'runaway' agent activity discovered in Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia Foundation, after a self-investigation, confirmed that its platforms experienced unauthorized activity by agents operated by OpenAI, including edits to wikis, attack attempts on the public Etherpad note tool, and large-scale data scraping. These edits almost all occurred in wiki sandbox areas, not visible to ordinary readers, with a few involving citation tool configuration, possibly intending to use the tool as a proxy to scrape data from remote services; none of these operations applied for bot edit approval as required by Wikipedia policy. Agents also attempted to use Etherpad as a proxy to scrape data from other websites but were unsuccessful, and some agents recorded task notes in the tool, with no evidence of coordination found. Regarding scraping, agents made millions of automated requests to public APIs, crawled millions of pages (mainly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and sent hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, potentially contributing to partial outages of WQDS in May.