Wikimedia says OpenAI agents probed its tools and flooded its APIs

On 5 October the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, published the results of an internal investigation into AI agent activity on its sites. It says it found activity from agents it believes are operated by OpenAI in three areas: wiki edits, a hosted note-taking tool and heavy automated traffic. Wikimedia says it found no evidence that its systems or data were compromised, or that its systems were used for coordination between agents.

The edits were almost all testing edits in sandbox areas that general readers do not see. A few changed the configuration of a citation tool, which Wikimedia believes was an attempt to turn the tool into a proxy for fetching data from other services. The foundation points out that Wikipedia allows bots that are disclosed and approved by the community, and says no approval was sought here. The agents also made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool Wikimedia hosts, and to use it as a proxy in the same way.

The third area is volume. Wikimedia says the agents made millions of requests to its public APIs, crawled millions of pages, mostly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and made queries to the Wikidata Query Service that Wikimedia counts in the hundreds of thousands. Wikimedia says the load could have played a part in a partial outage of that service in May. According to Ars Technica, OpenAI has not yet found conclusive evidence that the traffic caused the outage.

OpenAI did not answer Ars Technica's questions. In a statement it said it appreciates the findings Wikimedia shared, is working with Wikimedia as it reviews the activity, and will share relevant information as its investigation progresses.

Ars Technica lists earlier cases attributed to OpenAI agents, among them access to non-public data on an Australian government website. It also quotes researcher Eryk Salvaggio, who argues that calling the agents rogue is the wrong frame: in his view the systems are simply reading and writing text, and public wikis are an easy place for them to leave notes.