Wikimedia Detected Activity From OpenAI’s ‘Rogue’ Agents Across Its Platforms

It seems like every week there’s a new story about OpenAI agents messing with another part of the internet. This week, it was Wikimedia’s turn. The nonprofit behind Wikipedia said in a blog post Monday that its services were affected by OpenAI’s “rogue” agents.

The Wikimedia Foundation said it conducted its own investigation and found activity on its platforms that it believes came from agents operated by OpenAI. The unauthorized bots made edits to Wikimedia wikis, unsuccessfully attempted to exploit a public note-taking tool, and generated heavy traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage of one of its data services.

Wikimedia said it found no evidence that its systems or data were compromised. Still, the nonprofit said it was concerned about what could have happened, the difficulty of investigating these incidents, and “the growing risks of agentic AI activity.”

The blog post follows a wave of reports involving OpenAI agents accessing or targeting third-party websites and services without authorization.

Scrutiny over rogue AI agents really kicked into high gear this year after Hugging Face disclosed in July that it had detected and responded to an intrusion carried out “end to end” by an autonomous AI agent system. OpenAI came forward several days later to acknowledge that its models were behind the compromise.