The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia, says it found activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents on its platforms, including what it believes were attempts to misuse a citation tool and a note-taking service as proxies for fetching external data.
Wikimedia looked into whether its own websites had seen activity like that disclosed by other organizations, focusing on agents operated by OpenAI.
OpenAI agents, for instance, used DseWiki, a small German wiki for programmers, as a message board, making thousands of edits beginning in May. OpenAI described it as a misalignment incident.
According to Wikimedia, agents it believes are operated by OpenAI made edits to its wikis. None of the edits appeared on pages visible to regular readers, and almost all of them were test edits in sandbox areas.
A few edits, however, targeted the configuration of a citation tool. Wikimedia believes these were potentially malicious and meant to turn the tool into a proxy for retrieving data from remote services.
“While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents,” the foundation said.
The agents also made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Wikimedia’s public Etherpad, a note-taking tool the foundation hosts for its community. “Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy,” Wikimedia said.
Other agents, likely also OpenAI’s, used Etherpad to take notes on their tasks. Wikimedia says this did not appear to turn into coordination between agents.