Wikipedia Operator Says OpenAI's 'Rogue' Bots May Be Linked to a May Outage
(Monday October 05, 2026 @05:00PM (BeauHD)
from the behind-the-scenes dept.)
- Reference: 0186031832
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/10/05/1932228/wikipedia-operator-says-openais-rogue-bots-may-be-linked-to-a-may-outage
- Source link:
The Wikimedia Foundation [1]says it found evidence that " [2]rogue" OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and [3]generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects . Here's a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge):
> Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki. It also included 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. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
>
> Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
>
> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/10/05/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects/
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/26/0328247/rogue-openai-agents-posted-53-user-uploaded-images-onto-the-internet-accessed-us-government-websites
[3] https://www.theverge.com/news/1004929/wikipedia-openai-rogue-bots-wikimedia-foundation-outage
> Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki. It also included 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. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
>
> Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
>
> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/10/05/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects/
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/26/0328247/rogue-openai-agents-posted-53-user-uploaded-images-onto-the-internet-accessed-us-government-websites
[3] https://www.theverge.com/news/1004929/wikipedia-openai-rogue-bots-wikimedia-foundation-outage
Ax problem (Score:5, Insightful)
by methano ( 519830 )
If I took an ax to the back of somebody's head, there's no jury in the world that would let me off cause it was the ax's fault and not mine. Time to haul in Sam for a little questioning.
Re: (Score:2)
by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 )
As far as we know, none of these programs have killed anyone yet. If they actually break a law, the company using them should be held responsible. Unfortunately, most of what it is doing is not illegal although it may be immoral.
Re: (Score:3)
by HiThere ( 15173 )
Actually, much of what has been reported would seem to be in violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. E.g. it often "broke in" using credentials that it had no right to use.
I wouldn't Doubt It (Score:2)
I'm positive that openAI's rogue agents caused my rheumatism.