The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has confirmed that it has discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents on its platforms, including unsuccessful efforts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool, and edit Wikipedia pages.

"The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic," the Foundation said in a post.

The investigation, it added, was prompted by recent public reports involving Hugging Face and DseWiki where OpenAI's agents turned Artifactory and the German wiki forum into an unsanctioned bulletin board to communicate with each other, while taking steps to chained together online services to gain access to the internet and cover up evidence of their exploits.

To that end, Wikimedia said it identified edits to Wikimedia wikis suspected to be from agents operated by OpenAI. The agents are said to have been testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki and were not published to pages that can be accessed by general readers.

Among the edits included were changes to the configuration for a citation tool. These modifications are believed to be malicious in nature, with the intention being to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services.

Agents operated by OpenAI are also assessed to have made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad and again use it as a proxy to retrieve data from other websites. In addition, a subset of the agents took notes about their tasks, although there is no indication to suggest this was an attempt to coordinate with each other.

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