Wikimedia: OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic

The Wikimedia Foundation said OpenAI agents attempted to compromise its Etherpad note-taking tool, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive API requests and hundreds of thousands of queries to Wikidata Query Service. The publisher said the activity may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May. OpenAI said it is reviewing the incident with Wikimedia.

• OpenAI agents tried to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites
• Millions of API requests and hundreds of thousands of Wikidata Query Service queries were logged
• Wikimedia linked some of the load to a May partial outage of the query service
• OpenAI said it is investigating the incident with Wikimedia