According to the Wikimedia Foundation, rogue OpenAI agents edited wikis without permission, tried to abuse a citation tool as a proxy, and may have caused a partial Wikidata Query Service outage through massive crawling. Wikimedia says AI companies need to take responsibility for their agents instead of pushing the burden onto volunteer editors.

The article Wikimedia confirms OpenAI's rogue AI agents edited wikis, tried to compromise tools, and hammered its infrastructure appeared first on The Decoder.

The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.

The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted “malicious edits” that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.

The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said.

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