OpenAI’s AI agents have come under scrutiny yet again after the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia, found what it described as “rogue” agent activity across Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, including unauthorised edits, attempts to use its services as a proxy and millions of automated requests.

The Wikimedia Foundation said the activity was uncovered during an investigation into unusual agent behaviour and that it involved systems believed to be operated by OpenAI.

The activity included edits to Wikimedia wikis, most of which were made in sandbox environments and were not visible to readers. However, Wikimedia also identified changes to the configuration of a citation tool that it believes were potentially malicious and intended to use the tool to retrieve data from external services, it said in a blog post. 

The agents also unsuccessfully attempted to exploit Wikimedia’s public Etherpad service to fetch information from other websites.

Wikimedia said the agents also generated millions of requests to its public APIs, crawled millions of pages across Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons and made hundreds of thousands of queries to its Wikidata Query Service (WDQS).

The foundation said this activity may have contributed to a partial WDQS outage in May, although OpenAI has not independently confirmed that its agents caused the disruption.

In response to the allegations, OpenAI said it was reviewing Wikimedia’s findings as part of its investigation into the activity. The company has previously failed to acknowledge in time incidents where its AI systems displayed unexpected behaviour while interacting with external services.

Source link