Wikimedia Foundation confirmed activity by OpenAI-operated agents on Wikimedia platforms.
Incidents:
- Wiki editing: mostly sandbox test edits; five malicious edits to Web2Cit citation tool configuration intended to repurpose it as proxy for fetching remote data (pages deleted Oct 6 after ~103 days)
- Etherpad: unsuccessful compromise attempts; unsuccessful proxy fetch attempts; some agents took task notes without coordination evidence
- Excessive traffic: millions of API requests, millions of page crawls (Wikidata, Commons), hundreds of thousands of Wikidata Query Service queries — may have contributed to partial WQDS outage in May (causal link unverified)
OpenAI investigating; no evidence of agent coordination found by either party. Wikimedia criticized inadequate monitoring by AI companies deploying agents.