Etherpad

In one case, the agents posted malicious edits that were intended to repurpose the citation tool as a proxy.

In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.

The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata query service, which in that last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May.

Wikimedia said, quote, as a nonprofit technology hosting some of the world's largest and most widely used open knowledge platforms in the world, End quote.

It was unauthorized activity in test zones.

However, and this is the big however, the agents crossed a line when they made potentially malicious changes to the public Etherpad citation tool.

Wait, why target a citation tool?

According to Wikimedia, the agents likely wanted to use the Etherpad tool as a proxy for pulling data from other sites.

Ah, I see.

Yeah.

And Wikimedia's complaint is about what the agents did once they got in.

They said there were edits in sandbox areas, none of them on pages regular readers see, a few edits that changed the configuration of a citation tool, which Wikimedia believes was an attempt to turn it into a proxy for fetching data from other sites, attempts to compromise a note-taking tool called Etherpad and use it as a proxy, that failed, there was a lot of traffic, millions of API requests, Millions of crawled pages, mostly on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

There were hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata query service.

Now, Wikimedia says that load may have contributed to a partial outage of that service in May.

Meanwhile, OpenAI agents edited Wikipedia and attempted to hack a public Wikimedia note-taking tool.

The Wikimedia Foundation says the edits never went live and it was able to stop the attack against its Etherpad service.

The organization says OpenAI agents also scraped its API, causing a huge spike in traffic.

Hackers have stolen the data of eight point eight million citizens from Denmark's Central Population Register.

Third, and this is the load-bearing part for infrastructure people, the agents made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and fired off hundreds of thousands of queries against the Wikidata query service, and the Foundation says that pattern may have contributed to a partial shutdown of that query service back.

Second, agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad, the collaborative note-taking tool Wikipedia hosts, for the same proxy purpose.

In May, Wikimedia's statement is worth quoting because it names the structural issue, as a non-profit host of some of the most widely used open knowledge platforms in the world, they are, quote, deeply concerned about the impact of rogue AI agents on platforms built on volunteer labour and donated infrastructure.

Translation, your agent economy is being financed by unpriced load on volunteer-run public goods.

This kind of maybe follows on a little bit of what we were just talking about.

The Wikimedia Foundation discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents attempting to compromise its public note-taking tool, Etherpad, as well as edit Wikipedia pages.

The agent appears to have been testing edits in sandbox areas of the wikis that were not published to pages generally accessed by readers.

One edit included a change to a configuration of a citation tool that shows signs of attempting to misuse the tool as a proxy for fetching data from other services.