Wikimedia Foundation: OpenAI agents tried to edit pages and compromise notes tool

OpenAI agents tried to compromise a public note-taking tool, attempted to edit Wikipedia pages and possibly contributed to site disruptions earlier this year, according to a new statement from the Wikimedia Foundation.

The nonprofit released a detailed investigative report about a series of incidents involving OpenAI agents that repeatedly abused the site’s rules and took several unauthorized actions. 

The California-based foundation is best known for hosting and running Wikipedia — which has more than 67 million articles across 300 languages. It has become one of the most popular sources of information over the last decade, allowing people to make verified edits to pages.

The organization’s investigation found edits made to Wikipedia pages by OpenAI agents that were not published. The agents also made “potentially malicious edits” that were intended to misuse a citation tool “as a proxy for fetching data from remote services.”

Wikipedia does allow bots to make edits to pages when they are disclosed and approved by community editors, but those rules weren’t followed in this incident. 

Wikimedia also found two other issues tied to OpenAI agents, including unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad — a note-taking tool the organization hosts as a community service.