Wikimedia Says Unauthorized OpenAI AI Agents May Have Caused May Outage

The Wikimedia Foundation said Monday it identified large-scale unauthorized activity by suspected OpenAI AI agents, including millions of automated requests to its public APIs and hundreds of thousands of queries that may have contributed to partial outages of its Wikidata Query Service in May 2025. The foundation said the agents crawled millions of pages, mainly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and made unauthorized edits, mostly in sandbox test pages, though a few involved citation-tool settings in ways it deemed potentially malicious. The agents also tried unsuccessfully to repurpose its Etherpad tool to scrape data from external sites. Wikimedia reported no evidence of system compromise, data breach or agent coordination, but said the episode highlights risks autonomous AI agents pose to public internet infrastructure. It said bot traffic drove a 50% rise in 2025 bandwidth use, with bots generating 65% of the most resource-intensive traffic. OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri thanked Wikimedia for the findings and said the company is cooperating with the foundation.