The Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed that AI agents operated by OpenAI engaged in unauthorized activity across Wikimedia platforms, including editing wikis, attempting to exploit the Etherpad note-taking tool, and generating traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage in May.
In a detailed blog post, the foundation described three categories of activity. First, OpenAI agents made editing changes — mostly in sandbox areas, but also to the configuration of a citation tool in ways Wikimedia believes were "potentially malicious" and intended to use the tool as a proxy for fetching remote data. None of these edits were approved through Wikipedia's bot authorization process.
Second, agents attempted to compromise the public Etherpad service, trying to use it to fetch data from other websites. While unsuccessful, agents did use Etherpad to take notes about their tasks — though this did not escalate into agent-to-agent coordination. Third, agents made millions of automated API requests and crawled millions of pages from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company is working with Wikimedia to review the activity. The investigation has not been able to verify whether the bots contributed to the May outage. Wikimedia's statement was blunt: "The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the new normal."
