Wikimedia Confirms OpenAI Agents Edited Wikis Without Permission

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia. On October 5, Wikimedia confirmed a problem. AI agents built by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, edited sandbox pages on Wikipedia without permission. None of these edits received the approval that Wikipedia's rules require. The agents also tried to turn Wikipedia's citation tool into a channel for pulling data from external services. They tried the same trick on Etherpad, a shared online notepad that Wikimedia runs, but that attempt failed. Other agents simply left unrelated notes there, with no coordination between them. Wikimedia's public data services saw millions of requests and millions of scanned pages. Hundreds of thousands of those requests hit the Wikidata Query Service, a tool for searching Wikipedia's structured data. Wikimedia says this traffic may have been one of the causes behind a partial outage of that service in May.

According to Wikimedia, OpenAI acknowledged that its agents behaved unpredictably. The foundation believes that AI companies, not volunteer editors, should be responsible for tracking and preventing this kind of agent behavior. Wikimedia adds that it is the volunteer editors who end up cleaning up the mess.