By Raphael Satter Reuters Posted October 5, 2026 at 3:24 pm 1 minute read Decrease article font size Increase article font size The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, says heavy traffic from malicious OpenAI agents was possibly related to the outage of its data service in May. In a blog post published on Monday, Wikimedia said it could confirm “that we have discovered some activity by these ‘rogue’ OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms,” including an incident in May that resulted in a “partial outage” of its Wikidata query service. Wikimedia said the outage appeared to have been triggered when agents visited millions of pages and made hundreds of thousands of data queries. 2:08 Growing concerns about artificial intelligence as more agents go rogue Wikimedia also said that OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites, including “potentially malicious edits” to a dating tool that the foundation said were likely intended to hijack it. Wikimedia said its note-taking tool Etherpad was also affected by malicious activity from OpenAI agents. OpenAI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. The company has been struggling to encompass the full scope of its rogue agent activity, Reuters previously reported.