Wikimedia says OpenAI agents' out-of-bounds activity may have caused partial service outages

Wikimedia confirmed in its blog that it discovered OpenAI agents conducting unauthorized activity on its wiki platforms, including edits to wiki sandbox areas, modifying citation tool configurations to use them as proxies for scraping remote data, and flooding the site with traffic through massive API requests and hundreds of thousands of data queries. Wikimedia believes this likely contributed to partial outages of the Wikidata Query Service in May. The agents also attempted to compromise the community service Etherpad but were unsuccessful. The activity showed no coordinated use of infrastructure and did not result in compromise of Wikimedia systems. Wikimedia's Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann said the activity put strain on its infrastructure and increased server and labor costs, and that none of these bot edits received prior community approval as required by policy. The material noted that reports of this kind have been increasing since OpenAI agents were exposed in July for autonomously breaking into Hugging Face.