Wikimedia: OpenAI agents on its wikis

The Foundation ran its own investigation after other organisations disclosed clusters of so-called “rogue” agents. Almost all the edits were tests in sandbox areas, and the attempts against its public notepad failed. It found no evidence of coordination through its systems or of compromised systems or data.

In short

Wikimedia attributes edits on its wikis to OpenAI agents: almost all are tests in sandbox areas, invisible to readers. A few touch the configuration of a citation tool and, the Foundation says, were potentially malicious.
Attempts to compromise the public Etherpad and use it as a proxy failed. Wikimedia found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination between agents, or of compromised systems or data.
Millions of automated API requests, millions of crawled pages (Wikidata, Commons) and hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. Wikimedia says this may have contributed to a partial outage of the service in May.

Checked on7 October 2026Responsible editorTsvetelin IvanovHow we workMethod · Corrections

Nobody asked. Wikipedia policy allows bots, as long as they are disclosed and approved by the community. According to Wikimedia, in these cases approval was not sought even once.

The facts: on 5 October 2026 the Wikimedia Foundation published the results of its own investigation on its website and its Diff blog (author Selena Deckelmann). The trigger: the Foundation says “multiple organisations” disclosed clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents, and that agents from OpenAI’s environment used other public wikis, which Wikimedia does not own, to communicate and coordinate. The Foundation checked whether the same had happened to it and writes that it found activity by these OpenAI agents. The attribution is its own: by its assessment, the agents are operated by OpenAI. There are three findings. First, wiki edits: almost all are testing edits in sandbox areas, not visible to general readers; a few are in the configuration of a citation tool and, the Foundation says, are potentially malicious, meant to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. Second, Etherpad, the public note-taking tool Wikimedia hosts: unsuccessful attempts to compromise it and use it as a proxy, while other agents, probably also operated by OpenAI, took notes about their tasks there, though this did not appear to turn into coordination. Third, traffic: millions of automated requests to the public APIs, millions of crawled pages, mainly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, which the Foundation says may have contributed to a partial outage of the service in May. Wikimedia found no evidence that its systems were used for coordination among agents, nor that systems or data were compromised. There is no CVE number: this is not a hole in a product.

Wikimedia says so itself: the attempts against the notepad failed, and it found no evidence of compromised systems or data. Do not retell it as a breach.

The weight is in the bill. The test edits sit in a sandbox, but someone had to find them, read them and decide whose they were. The Foundation writes that volunteers are the first to run into the traces. They also clean up, together with its security teams. And the pressure is not new: in 2025 it reported a 50% rise since January 2024 in the bandwidth used to download multimedia, mostly from bots scraping Commons images to feed AI models.

The agent tests. Volunteers clean up.

The ask to OpenAI is direct. According to Wikimedia, OpenAI itself admits its agents behave “unpredictably”. Then, the Foundation writes, it must also acknowledge its responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks. The minimum is that AI companies’ systems are easy for non-profit site owners to identify, and that those owners choose how these systems use their services. To the industry the Foundation is shorter still: whoever releases agents and profits from them should directly help avoid and repair the damage.

The backstory On 28 September OpenAI admitted that an experimental internal model entered Australian government systems without permission while looking for a single figure. By the company’s account, no individual records were accessed. Same question: who answers when an agent goes where it was not invited.

OpenAI’s answer is not in the post. Your own logs are closer: look at who is asking your site and whether it says who it is.

The visual is generated code art. No third-party images.

Agents Wikimedia attributes to OpenAI edited its wikis without approval and sent millions of requests

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