Wikimedia says outage may be linked to OpenAI agents — The Verge

The Wikimedia Foundation said it had detected activity on its platforms from agents that it believes were operated by OpenAI. A large number of automated requests may have been linked to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May, The Verge reports.

Edits and access attempts

Wikimedia reported edits to wiki pages that were likely made by agents linked to OpenAI. Almost all of these changes were tests and did not appear on pages available to the general public. The foundation also recorded several changes to the settings of the citation tool, which it considers potentially harmful: they may have been intended for use as a proxy to retrieve data from remote services.

Wikipedia's rules allow bots to edit pages after disclosure of information about them and approval by the community. According to Wikimedia, no such approvals were obtained in these cases.

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The agents, which the foundation also links to OpenAI, unsuccessfully attempted to compromise the public Etherpad notes service and use it as a proxy to retrieve data from other websites. Other agents kept notes about their tasks, but Wikimedia found no signs of coordination among them.

Millions of requests to Wikimedia services

According to the foundation, the agents made millions of automated requests to Wikimedia's public APIs, downloaded millions of pages, mostly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and also sent hundreds of thousands of requests to the Wikidata Query Service. This traffic may have contributed to the partial outage of the service in May.

The Wikimedia Foundation said it found no evidence that its systems were used to coordinate agents, nor any signs that systems or data had been compromised. OpenAI did not provide a prompt comment in response to the publication's request.