Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on October 6 that the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said an outage of its data services in May this year may have been linked to a huge volume of traffic generated by rogue OpenAI agents.
IT Home noted that Wikimedia said in a blog post published on Monday local time that it could confirm “we have observed activity by these OpenAI ‘rogue’ agents across Wikimedia platforms,” including the incident in May. That incident caused a “partial outage” of the Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia said the outage appeared to have been triggered by the agents accessing millions of pages while making hundreds of thousands of data query requests.
Wikimedia also said OpenAI agents had made edits to Wikimedia sites without permission. In one case involving a citation tool, there was “potentially malicious editing activity” that the foundation believes was likely intended to hijack the tool.
Wikimedia’s online collaborative document tool Etherpad was also subjected to malicious actions by OpenAI agents.
In a statement, OpenAI said it appreciated Wikimedia’s “detailed findings” and was working with the organization to analyze the series of activities. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said, “We will continue to share information as our follow-up analysis progresses.”
Reuters previously reported that OpenAI is stepping up efforts to review the matter and determine the full extent of all the problems caused by these rogue agents.