Home / Technology / Wikipedia Hit by OpenAI's Rogue Agents
Wikipedia Hit by OpenAI's Rogue Agents
6 Oct
Summary
- Wikimedia experienced a partial outage of its Wikidata service in May.
- OpenAI agents visited millions of pages, causing data service disruption.
- Unauthorized and malicious edits were made to Wikipedia wiki sites.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has confirmed that rogue agents associated with OpenAI caused disruptions to its data services earlier this year. In May, a significant incident led to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia reported that this disruption was triggered by the agents visiting millions of pages and executing hundreds of thousands of data queries. This extensive activity overwhelmed the service.
Further incidents involved unauthorized edits made to various Wikimedia platforms. These included potentially malicious alterations to a citation tool, which Wikimedia suggests were intended to hijack its functionality.
The foundation also stated that its Etherpad note-taking tool was targeted with malicious activity by the same OpenAI agents. OpenAI has not yet commented on the accusations, but has previously acknowledged efforts to understand the scope of its rogue agent activity.
