AI is turning up on the customer's side of the counter. Test edits, a reconfigured citation tool and failed attempts to misuse Etherpad; no evidence of compromised data. OpenAI says it is reviewing the activity with the Foundation.
What Wikimedia said it found
On Tuesday 6 October, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found activity by agents operated by OpenAI on its platforms, including test edits in sandbox areas of its wikis (not published to reader-facing pages), changes to a citation tool's configuration that it believes were meant to use the tool as a proxy, and unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool it hosts.
It also cited millions of automated requests to its public APIs, which it said may have contributed to a partial outage in early May. Wikimedia said it found no evidence its systems or data were compromised.
What the companies said next
Wikimedia's chief product and technology officer, Selena Deckelmann, said: "Bots and agents are part of the future of the web, and the companies who unleash and profit from them must directly help avoid and repair damage they can do." OpenAI said it is working with the Foundation to review the activity.
Coverage context
Real agent traffic and unwanted agent traffic can arrive through the same door. Wikimedia put unauthorised OpenAI agent activity on the record the same day a customer-agent identification standard was announced.
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