A Wikipedia logo is displayed at the Wikimedia Foundation office in San Francisco, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu).
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, says that heavy traffic from OpenAI rogue agents was possibly tied to disruption that its data service experienced in May.
In a blog post issued on Monday, Wikimedia said it could confirm “that we have discovered some activity by these ‘rogue’ OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms,” including a May incident that resulted in a “partial outage” of its Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia said the disruption seemed to have been triggered as the agents visited millions of pages and made hundreds of thousands of data queries.
Growing concerns over artificial intelligence as more agents go rogue
Wikimedia also said that the OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites, including “potentially malicious edits” to a citation tool which the foundation said were likely intended to hijack it.
Wikimedia said its Etherpad note-taking tool was also hit by malicious activity from OpenAI’s agents.
OpenAI did not immediately return an email seeking comment. The company has been scrambling to get its arms around the full scope of its rogue agent activity, Reuters has previously reported.
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