Wikimedia Foundation investigated clusters of agentic activity linked to OpenAI and confirmed unauthorized automated behavior across its projects. Findings include hundreds of sandbox edits and a few configuration changes to a citation tool believed to be attempts to proxy remote data access, unsuccessful probing and attempted misuse of a public Etherpad note-taking service, and massive automated traffic: millions of API requests, millions of pages crawled (mostly from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). Wikimedia found no evidence that its systems were used to coordinate agents or that its data was exfiltrated, though the heavy query load likely contributed to a partial WQDS outage in May.
Wikimedia argues these incidents expose structural risks: volunteer editors and foundation security teams are bearing the cost of cleaning up misleading edits and repairing infrastructure strained by bot-driven traffic. Bandwidth use rose 50% in 2025 and bots accounted for 65% of the most resource-intensive traffic. The Foundation calls on AI companies, specifically OpenAI, to take responsibility for monitoring and preventing agent misbehavior, make their systems identifiable to site operators, and join Wikimedia in protecting the open web so shared knowledge resources remain reliable and accessible.
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