OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic

The reports of OpenAI agents harming 3rd party sites keep coming. OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic. Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.

The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted “malicious edits” that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.

The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said. “As a non-profit technology host of some of the largest and most widely used open knowledge platforms in the world, we are deeply concerned about the impact of ‘rogue’ AI agents on platforms like ours, which are built by volunteers from around the world and rely on the promise of the open internet,” Wikimedia said.

Wikimedia says it’s "deeply concerned about the impact of ‘rogue’ AI agents on platforms like ours. Wikimedia links OpenAI agents to an outage and unauthorized activity.

The foundation says it detected unauthorized activity from OpenAI agents on its platforms, including edits to some wikis and failed attempts to compromise a note-taking tool. It reiterated that bots have been crawling data from its platforms en masse, while agents that appear to be operated by OpenAI have made millions of requests to its public APIs.

An investigation didn’t turn up any evidence that AI agents were using Wikimedia systems to coordinate their activity (as they appear to have done on non-Wikimedia-operated wikis) and nor did the foundation detect signs of its data or systems being compromised. "However, we are concerned about what could have occurred here, the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity, and the growing risks of agentic AI activity on our platforms in general," Selena Deckelmann, the foundation’s chief product and technology officer, wrote in a blog post.

We should not allow this behavior to become the ‘new normal’ for the people or organizations that maintain it." has contacted OpenAI for comment. It appears OpenAI agents edited some Wikimedia wikis without permission.

Almost all of these were test edits in sandbox sections of wikis and weren’t visible on pages that users would generally access.

“Incidents like this one, and the many others that have been (and are still being) uncovered, illustrate how AI agents can drain resources and crash servers, as well as attempt to compromise trustworthy information.” Agents will be agents In well over a half-dozen cases, OpenAI agents have been caught taking actions that would likely result in criminal charges being filed had human hackers taken them.