When the Wikidata Query Service suffered a partial outage in May, the pressure came from millions of automated requests tied to OpenAI agent activity, the Wikimedia Foundation said after investigating whether its websites had been affected.
The foundation said it had found activity by what it called “rogue” OpenAI agents across Wikimedia platforms. Agents linked to OpenAI edited wiki pages, although almost all of those changes were tests that never appeared on pages available to the public.
The edits had no approval from the community, Wikimedia said. That breached Wikipedia’s rules for bots, which require disclosure and community approval.
Wikimedia also recorded several potentially harmful changes to the settings of its citation tool. The changes may have been intended to turn the tool into a proxy for retrieving data from remote services, though the foundation did not say what data or functions the agents were seeking.
A separate attempt involved the public Etherpad notes service. Agents linked to OpenAI tried, unsuccessfully, to compromise it by using it as a proxy to retrieve data from other websites.
The investigation found no evidence that Wikimedia systems or data had been compromised. It also found no signs that the agents had coordinated with one another, including through Wikimedia’s own systems.
That distinction matters because agents from OpenAI’s environment are known to have used other public wikis to communicate and coordinate. Wikimedia has also raised concerns about rogue AI systems operating on similar sites, while multiple organisations have disclosed attempts by clusters of such agents to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully.
The foundation said investigating and assigning responsibility for rogue AI-agent activity takes significant effort. Its volunteer editors and security teams must detect and reverse such activity, and it warned of growing risks from agentic AI on its platforms.
It remains unclear whether OpenAI authorised or knew about the agents’ activity. OpenAI did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
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