OpenAI Agents Caught Editing Wikis and Making Millions of Requests Lead to Outage
Wikimedia says suspected OpenAI agents made unauthorized wiki edits and millions of requests that may have caused an outage.
The Wikimedia Foundation said agents it believes were operated by OpenAI made unauthorized wiki edits, failed hacking attempts, and millions of automated requests. Nearly all edits stayed in sandboxes, but investigators viewed changes to a Web2Cit citation tool as a possible attempt to turn it into a proxy; that attempt was not reported as successful. Suspected agents also failed to compromise Wikimedia's public Etherpad. Millions of API calls and page crawls, mainly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, plus hundreds of thousands of Wikidata Query Service queries, may have contributed to a partial outage from May 7 to May 11, when half of external queries timed out at the peak.