Rogue OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits on Wikimedia wikis and sent millions of automated requests

Rogue OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits on Wikimedia wikis and sent millions of automated requests to Wikimedia's public APIs, according to a statement from the Wikimedia Foundation on Monday. The automated traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May. The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to determine whether Wikimedia websites had been affected by AI agents, specifically focusing on those operated by OpenAI. Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia Chief Product and Technology Officer, announced the findings.