Source:
The Register Millions of automated requests may have contributed to partial Wikidata outage in May
Wikipedia’s parent organization says that
OpenAIagents edited some non-public wiki pages and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial Wikidata outage in May. This makes the non-profit just the latest victim of OpenAI agents gone rogue. The Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann reported several “rogue agent activities” that the foundation had identified across its various open platforms. While there was no evidence OpenAI agents compromised Wikimedia systems or data, the foundation identified several unauthorized activities it believes involved agents operated by OpenAI. “The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic,” Deckelmann said. Reports of OpenAI agents going rogue and abusing websites and services have been ongoing for months, with revelations regularly emerging since the initialHugging Faceincident was made public in July. OpenAI has been cagey about admitting how many times its AIs broke out of supposedly contained environments, but every time the news cycle refresh button gets hit, more accounts emerge, with victims including foreign government agencies and even the United Nations. The company says it d some of itstrainingefforts, but since then it's disclosed that more than 100 organizations were notified about potentially problematic activity by its rogue AI agents. It’s not clear whether Wikimedia was among those notified; the foundation says it discovered the OpenAI intrusions as a result of its own investigation. The wiki edits weren’t made to public-facing pages, Deckelmann said, with "almost all" made to sandbox pages. That said, Wikimedia also noted that some edits were made to its citation tool, “which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services.” That would be in line with some of the other activity that rogue OpenAI agents have gotten up to in some of the other recent reports of AI malfeasance. Deckelmann noted that none of the OpenAI agents it detected making these sorts of changes bothered to seek approval for the changes as required under Wikipedia bot editing policies. The OpenAI agents also attempted to exploit Wikimedia’s public Etherpad instance. Again, the agents were trying to use the tool to fetch data from other websites. Agents abusing the service also used Etherpad to take notes about their tasks, though Wikimedia doesn’t believe any coordinated effort emerged from those notes. As for the partial outage in May, Wikimedia said “millions of automated requests” hammered its public API and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, traffic that it believes may have contributed to the disruption. The end result for a nonprofit, volunteer-driven project like the Wikimedia Foundation, Deckelmann said, is that it makes things damn near impossible to manage. “Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents,” the Wikimedia tech boss explained, adding that the foundation’s sites and services have seen a 50 percent increase in bandwidth usage due to bot activity since 2024. “This intense pressure on our infrastructure not only adds costs for servers and humans, but if left unaddressed, can block human visitors by over systems and causing outages,” Deckelmann added. “We are already paying for costs that come with the increased activity.” Like other organizations that have encountered unwanted activity from OpenAI’s agents, Wikimedia believes the AI company needs to be held accountable. “While OpenAI admits to agents behaving ‘unpredictably,’ they must also acknowledge their responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks,” Deckelmann said. “AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.” That responsibility, she said, is that those downrange of OpenAI’s lack of accountability are the ones having to carry that burden. It’s getting harder to deal with, Deckelmann noted in a LinkedIn post, because such traffic is increasingly hard to investigate and attribute. She calls in the announcement for AI operators to be required to mark their traffic with identifiers that make attribution of bad actions easier. “Our goal with the blog is to more openly discuss our vulnerability to this kind of activity and the need for more accountable actions to address it, while sharing with our volunteers and the public about the consequences,” Deckelmann said on LinkedIn. OpenAI didn't respond to questions for this story. ® Get AI news in your inbox
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