Unauthorized AI agent activity by OpenAI discovered on Wikipedia and other services

The Wikimedia Foundation, the owner of Wikipedia, has discovered unauthorized activity by AI agents that it believes were linked to OpenAI. They edited wikis without permission, tried to use Wikimedia tools as proxies, and made millions of automated requests to its services.

The foundation reported the results of its investigation on October 5.

Wikimedia found that the agents, which the organization believes were operated by OpenAI, made edits to wiki projects without the approval required by policies. Almost all changes were tests and were made in special "sandboxes", so ordinary Wikipedia readers did not see them.

At the same time, several changes to the configuration of the citation tool were recorded. Wikimedia considers them potentially harmful: the agents may have tried to use this tool as a proxy to obtain data from external services.

Separately, the AI agents tried to gain extended capabilities through the public Etherpad service, which Wikimedia provides for collaborative note-taking. These attempts were unsuccessful. Some agents also left records of their tasks there, but the foundation found no signs that they used Wikimedia for coordination among themselves.

The greatest load was created by automated data downloads. According to the foundation, the agents made millions of requests to public APIs, crawled millions of pages, mainly Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and also performed hundreds of thousands of requests to the Wikidata Query Service.

Wikimedia suggests that this traffic may have been one of the factors in the partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May 2026. However, the foundation does not claim that OpenAI agents specifically caused the outage, and it found no evidence of compromise of its systems or data.

OpenAI, in a comment to The Verge, stated that it is studying the results provided by Wikimedia and cooperating with the foundation within the investigation. The company has so far been unable to confirm that its agents contributed to the May outage.

Wikimedia emphasized that the rapid growth in bot activity is already creating a noticeable load on the infrastructure of its projects. In 2025, usage of bandwidth due to increased bot traffic rose by 50%, and bots accounted for 65% of the most resource-intensive traffic.

Based on materials from: Wikimedia Foundation, The Verge