Autonomous OpenAI agents caused a partial outage of a Wikimedia online service and tried to use others as proxies as part of a series of unauthorized activities it performed across the nonprofit's wiki sites.
Inspired by reports of OpenAI agents attempting to break into websites and online services, Wikimedia — a nonprofit foundation that provides technology and Web-hosting services for Wikipedia and other public wikis — did some investigating of its own services, according to a blog post published this week.
What the organization found is that it too was the victim of OpenAI agents acting independently to disrupt sites and services. "We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these 'rogue' OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms," Wikimedia's chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann wrote in the post.
The unauthorized bot activities included minor infractions, such as edits to the organization's various wikis, to more serious ones, such as trying to exploit its Etherpad public note-taking tool as a proxy and flooding sites with traffic, resulting in a partial outage to its Wikidata Query Service, she said.
OpenAI did not immediately reply to Dark Reading's request for comment on the activity on Wednesday. However, reports of these activities are becoming increasingly more common since the revelation in July of an autonomous hack of Hugging Face by OpenAI agents, which sounded an alarm not only through the security community but the world at large. Since then, there has been much public discourse, dire warnings, and even the formation of a governmental AI task force by US President Donald Trump to find ways to rein in autonomous AI activity before it's too late.