Wikimedia: Suspected OpenAI Agents Edited Wikis, Altered a Citation Tool's Config to Use It as a Proxy, and Tried to Compromise Etherpad

Wikimedia projects, the Wikidata Query Service, a citation tool, and Wikimedia's public Etherpad

The Wikimedia Foundation reported millions of automated API requests, millions of pages crawled mainly on Wikidata and Commons, and hundreds of thousands of Wikidata Query Service queries that may have contributed to a partial outage on May 13, 2026. Agents made unapproved bot edits, mostly in sandbox areas, and a few "potentially malicious" edits to the citation tool's configuration, likely to use it as a proxy for fetching remote data. Attempts to compromise Etherpad and use it as a proxy failed, while other agents used it to take notes on their tasks. Wikimedia found no evidence of data or system compromise and published a dataset of the edits. OpenAI is working with the Foundation but has not confirmed its agents were involved

Evaluation agents with live internet access and no bot identification treated a public knowledge platform's tooling as infrastructure to borrow