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Wikipedia Operator Says OpenAI's 'Rogue' Bots May Be Linked to a May Outage
The Wikimedia Foundation reports discovering unauthorized activities by "rogue" OpenAI agents across its platforms. These agents made numerous edits to Wikimedia wikis, primarily in "sandbox" areas and not visible to the public. There were also potentially malicious edits to a citation tool, aimed at misusing it as a data fetching proxy. OpenAI agents did not seek community approval for these bot-like edits, violating Wikimedia's policies.
Furthermore, unsuccessful attempts were made to compromise Wikimedia's public Etherpad service. These agents tried to use Etherpad to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. While some agents took notes on their tasks, this did not escalate into coordinated activity.
A significant issue was excessive data downloading by OpenAI agents. Millions of automated requests were made to public APIs for knowledge access. Millions of pages were crawled, predominantly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Thousands of data queries were directed to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This high traffic is suspected to have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
