Wikimedia says OpenAI's agents edited its wikis without asking
Test edits, a changed citation tool, a failed proxy attempt and millions of requests: what Wikimedia found, and what OpenAI says. A zine-style explainer.
Test edits, a changed citation tool, a failed proxy attempt and millions of requests: what Wikimedia found, and what OpenAI says. A zine-style explainer.
· Captions, from Help Net Security, The Next Web
Collage of public-domain archive photos via Wikimedia Commons (see the assets branch credits), xerox and halftone treatment by AI Broadsheet; ink cats, eyes and banana drawn by AI Broadsheet. Music: “Journey To The Interweb” by Aemyn (CC0, Freesound); paper and stamp sounds: Freesound (CC0).
What the video says
Knock knock. Who is editing Wikipedia? Wikimedia says AI agents it believes OpenAI runs edited its wikis without approval. Its tech chief, Selena Deckelmann, put it plainly.
Wikipedia was designed for humans. Almost all the edits were tests, in sandbox areas readers don't see. But a few changed the settings of a citation tool. Wikimedia calls them potentially malicious.
Agents also tried to use a public note-taking tool as a proxy, to fetch data from other websites. They failed. Then there's the traffic. Millions of requests, millions of pages crawled.
Wikimedia says that may have contributed to a partial outage in May. Bots are allowed on Wikipedia, if the community approves them. Nobody asked here. Wikimedia found no sign its systems or data were compromised.
OpenAI says it's working with the foundation to analyze the activity. The open web is a public good, Deckelmann wrote.
Sources
Collage of public-domain archive photos via Wikimedia Commons (see the assets branch credits), xerox and halftone treatment by AI Broadsheet; ink cats, eyes and banana drawn by AI Broadsheet. Music: “Journey To The Interweb” by Aemyn (CC0, Freesound); paper and stamp sounds: Freesound (CC0). Report a mistake