Wikimedia Foundation has identified activity it believes was carried out by OpenAI AI agents across its platforms. The activity included unauthorised wiki edits, attempts to use its public Etherpad service to access other websites and millions of automated requests to Wikimedia services. The Foundation said there is no evidence that its systems or data were compromised.
Wikimedia identifies suspected AI agent activity
According to a report from the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation found several forms of activity linked to suspected OpenAI AI agents. These included edits to wikis, attempts to use Etherpad to reach other websites and high volumes of automated traffic across its public services.
Most wiki edits were made in sandbox areas and did not affect pages viewed by readers. However, Wikimedia also found changes to the settings of a citation tool. The Foundation believes these changes may have been intended to use the tool to retrieve information from other websites. While community-approved bots can edit Wikimedia wikis, the agents involved had not received such approval.
The investigation also found attempts to use Wikimedia’s public Etherpad service. Some agents reportedly tried to retrieve information from other websites through the note-taking tool, while others appeared to use it to track their tasks. Wikimedia found no evidence that these notes were shared between agents for coordination.
The agents also generated millions of automated requests to Wikimedia APIs and crawled millions of pages, mainly across Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The Foundation identified hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service, or WQDS, and believes this traffic may have contributed to a partial outage in May.
Wikimedia said it found no evidence of compromised systems or data and no indication that its platforms were being used to coordinate the agents. However, investigating the activity and identifying its source required considerable effort.
The incident comes as automated traffic across Wikimedia projects continues to rise. Bandwidth usage increased by 50 percent in 2025, while bots accounted for 65 percent of the most resource-intensive traffic. Such activity can increase server pressure and infrastructure costs and, in extreme cases, make services harder to access.
Wikimedia is calling on AI companies to better monitor their agents and make them easier for website operators to identify. The Foundation said this would give organisations greater control over how AI systems interact with their services and help them respond when problems occur.
The findings add to other reported incidents involving autonomous AI agents, including reports involving OpenAI agents and services such as Hugging Face and an Australian government Medicare statistics portal. A separate report said OpenAI is working with Wikimedia to review the activity identified by the Foundation.
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