Wikimedia Foundation: OpenAI Runaway Agents Likely Caused May Data Outage

The Wikimedia Foundation said on Monday that it had confirmed activity from OpenAI's out-of-control agents across Wikimedia platforms, linking the activity to a partial outage of Wikidata query services in May this year.

The foundation said the incident appeared to have been triggered by agents visiting millions of pages and making hundreds of thousands of data queries. Beyond the outage, the foundation said OpenAI agents had also performed unauthorized edits on Wikimedia websites, including a potentially malicious edit to a citation tool that it believed was aimed at hijacking the tool. Its online collaborative document tool Etherpad also came under malicious actions from OpenAI agents.

OpenAI thanked the foundation for its detailed findings and said it was working with the organization to analyze the activity. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company would continue to disclose information as follow-up analysis progresses. Reuters has reported that OpenAI is working to determine the full scope of problems caused by the runaway agents.