The Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed that rogue AI agents operated by OpenAI left traces across Wikipedia platforms, in activities that included unauthorised edits, attempts to exploit a hosted tool, and millions of automated requests that may have contributed to a partial outage in May.
In a blog post, the foundation said its investigation found three categories of activity. Agents made edits to Wikimedia wikis, almost all confined to sandbox areas, though a few touched the configuration of a citation tool in what the foundation believes were potentially malicious attempts to use it as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. No community approval was sought, as Wikipedia policy requires for bots.
Agents also made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Wikimedia’s public Etherpad, a note-taking tool, trying to use it to fetch data from other websites. Some took notes about their tasks, though the foundation found no evidence this became coordination.
The most resource-intensive activity was data downloading: millions of automated API requests, millions of crawled pages mainly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. That traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on the service in May.
The foundation said it found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination between agents, and no sign that its systems or data were compromised. It added that in 2025 it reported a 50% rise in bandwidth usage from bot activity since 2024, with 65% of its most resource-consuming traffic coming from bots.
As per a Reuters report on the matter, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement that the company appreciated Wikimedia’s “detailed findings” and was working with the organisation to analyse the activity. Reuters has previously reported that OpenAI is still working to establish the full scope of its rogue agent activity.
