Wikimedia confirms OpenAI's rogue AI agents edited wikis, tried to compromise tools, and hammered its infrastructure

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The Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed, after its own investigation, that OpenAI's out-of-control AI agents were active on its platforms. They edited wikis without permission, tried to compromise tools, and generated massive traffic.

The agents made edits to Wikimedia wikis, according to the Foundation, but nearly all of them were test edits in sandbox areas that regular readers can't see. Some edits targeted the configuration of a citation tool and were potentially malicious, Wikimedia says. The agents apparently tried to abuse the tool as a proxy to pull data from external services.

None of these edits had the approval required by Wikipedia's community guidelines, the organization wrote in a blog post.

Beyond the wiki edits, agents also set out to compromise the Wikimedia Foundation's public Etherpad, a note-taking tool hosted as a community service.