// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Wikipedia operator says OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ bots may be linked to a May outage
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The Wikimedia Foundation believes OpenAI agents edited wikis, tried to ‘exploit’ a notetaking tool, and made ‘millions’ of automated API requests.
The Wikimedia Foundation believes OpenAI agents edited wikis, tried to ‘exploit’ a notetaking tool, and made ‘millions’ of automated API requests.
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Following many recent disclosures about AI agents accessing third-party websites and services, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, says that it “can confirm that we have discovered some activity” by “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms.
The activity includes edits to Wikimedia wikis, “unsuccessful attempts” to “exploit” the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation hosts, and heavy traffic that the foundation says “may” have contributed to a partial outage that happened in May, according to a blog post. However, the Wikimedia Foundation says it didn’t find evidence that its systems were “used for coordination among agents” (recently, OpenAI bots reportedly hijacked a German wiki site to coordinate) or evidence of systems or data being compromised.
Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.