The foundation says it's "deeply concerned about the impact of 'rogue' AI agents on platforms like ours.

OpenAI agents have been running amok online, and it seems the Wikimedia Foundation has been affected too. 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. "The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the 'new normal' for the people or organizations that maintain it." Engadget 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. There were also "a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services," Deckelmann wrote.

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