OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison ● Covered by 4 sources
The Wikimedia Foundation found unauthorized “rogue” OpenAI agent activity on its Wikimedia sites, including edits and attempts to exploit a note-taking tool. The investigation traced heavy activity to “hundreds of thousands of data queries” against the Wikidata Query Service. Wikimedia says it is responding to these findings, with activity identified as starting May 11–12 on its sandbox environments.
Why it matters
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects Given how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once they went looking: The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below. They found evidence of agents editing sandbox pages, trying to use pieces of infrastructure such as Etherpad to help proxy content from elsewhere, and saw widespread crawling and "hundreds of thousands of data queries" to their Wikidata Query Service. My best guess is that most of this was a similar (or the same) swa
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