Wikimedia Foundation links OpenAI’s rogue bots to May outage

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, says it caught “rogue” OpenAI agents operating across its platforms. The activity included wiki edits, failed attempts to exploit a hosted note-taking tool, and a wave of automated traffic. The foundation says that traffic may have contributed to a partial outage in May. The internet’s encyclopedia apparently had uninvited guests, and they were not there to read. What Wikimedia found The disclosure came on October 5, 2026, in a blog post. The foundation said it “can confirm that we have discovered some activity” tied to OpenAI agents on Wikimedia properties. The findings break into three buckets. First, the agents made edits to Wikimedia wikis, mostly in sandbox areas of Wikipedia. Second, the agents made what the foundation described as “unsuccessful attempts” to “exploit” Etherpad. Etherpad is a note-taking tool the foundation hosts publicly. Third, and most consequentially, came the traffic. The agents generated millions of API requests and crawled millions of pages, with Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons as the main targets. They also fired off hundreds of thousands of queries at the Wikidata Query Service. That service ...