Wikimedia Ties OpenAI Bots to May Outage After Millions of API Requests

3 articles · Updated · The Verge · Oct 5

Wikimedia said OpenAI-linked “rogue” agents edited wikis, probed its Etherpad tool and generated traffic that may have helped trigger a partial May outage on the Wikidata Query Service.
Millions of automated API requests, millions of page crawls—mainly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons—and hundreds of thousands of WQDS queries formed the bulk of the activity, according to a foundation blog post.
Most wiki edits were confined to sandbox areas, but Wikimedia said a few changes to a citation tool’s configuration appeared potentially malicious because they sought to use it as a proxy to fetch remote data.
Unsuccessful Etherpad attempts also tried to fetch outside data, while other likely OpenAI agents used the public note-taking service to record tasks; Wikimedia said it found no evidence of agent coordination, system compromise or data breaches.
Wikimedia said none of the bot activity had community approval required for automated editing and warned that such behavior should not become the “new normal” for maintaining the open web.