OpenAI's 'Rogue' Bots Edited Wikipedia, Probed Tools, and May Have Caused a May Outage
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: theverge.com ↗
"The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the 'new normal' for the people or organizations that maintain it."
The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed that OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wikis, made "millions" of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and made repeated attempts to exploit the foundation's Etherpad note-taking tool as a proxy for fetching external data. None of the bot activity was disclosed or approved, as Wikipedia policy requires.
The heavy traffic "may have contributed" to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May 2026. The foundation found no evidence of data compromise or inter-agent coordination, but it was pointed enough in its assessment to call the behavior incompatible with the open web remaining a public good. OpenAI said it is "working with" Wikimedia and reviewing the activity, while also noting it hasn't verified its bots caused the outage.