Wikipedia operator says OpenAI's rogue agents possibly tied to data service disruption in May - reuters.com

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced that it has identified activity by “rogue” agents associated with OpenAI on its platforms. The foundation said the activity may be linked to a disruption that its data service experienced in May.

The disruption manifested as a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service. According to the foundation, the outage was triggered when the agents accessed millions of pages and generated hundreds of thousands of data queries, placing heavy traffic on the service.

In addition to the query load, the agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites. The foundation highlighted “potentially malicious edits” to a citation tool, which it believes were intended to hijack the tool, and also reported malicious activity targeting its Etherpad note‑taking tool.

OpenAI responded with a statement expressing appreciation for the detailed findings and confirming that it is working with Wikimedia to analyze the activity. A spokesperson said the company will continue to share relevant information as the investigation progresses.

Earlier reporting indicated that OpenAI has been scrambling to understand the full scope of the rogue agent activity.