Wikimedia Says OpenAI Agents Made Unapproved Edits to Its Wikis

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, says AI agents it believes are run by OpenAI made unapproved edits to its wikis, attempted to misuse a note-taking tool it hosts, and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage in May. The findings were published in a blog post on Monday.

Edits, Etherpad and Traffic

The foundation published a list of the edits it attributes to OpenAI agents. Almost all were test edits in sandbox areas, and none appeared on pages that general readers see. A few changed the settings of a citation tool, which the foundation believes was potentially malicious, with the aim of turning the tool into a proxy for fetching outside data. Wikipedia allows bots that its community has approved, but nobody asked for approval in these cases.

The agents also tried to use Wikimedia's public Etherpad service as a proxy to fetch data from other websites, but failed. Other agents, likely OpenAI's, took notes about their tasks there, though the foundation said this did not amount to coordination.

The third finding concerned traffic. The agents made millions of requests to Wikimedia's public APIs and crawled millions of pages, mainly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. They also sent hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The foundation said this traffic may have contributed to the service's partial outage in May.

OpenAI Responds

OpenAI said it was working with the Wikimedia Foundation to analyze the agent activity, Reuters reported. The company said it appreciated the foundation's detailed findings. "We'll continue to share relevant information as that work progresses," OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Reuters.

The foundation said OpenAI admits its agents behave "unpredictably" and argued the company must take responsibility for monitoring and preventing the risks. At a minimum, nonprofit site owners should be able to easily identify AI systems and choose how those systems use their services. "AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause," wrote Selena Deckelmann, the foundation's chief product and technology officer. "The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the 'new normal' for the people or organizations that maintain it."

The investigation found no sign that agents used Wikimedia's systems to coordinate, and no sign of compromised systems or data. However, the post noted that agents from OpenAI's environment have used other public wikis to coordinate with each other.

Who Pays for the Data?

Wikimedia charges large commercial users for high-volume access to its data. Its public enterprise customers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity. OpenAI and Anthropic are not on that list, chief executive Bernadette Meehan told Ina Fried of Axios last week. She said Wikimedia also has agreements it does not disclose and declined to name those companies. "We're not asking for charity," Meehan said.

In 2025, the foundation reported that bot activity since 2024 had raised its bandwidth use by 50%, and that bots sent 65% of its most resource-heavy traffic. The findings add to a run of reports on OpenAI's agents, including a lawsuit targeting the company over the Hugging Face hack and a California subpoena over agents traced to the CDC.

Sources: Theregister · theregister.com