Description: The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, reported unauthorized edits, attempted misuse of its web tools, and heavy traffic attributed to OpenAI AI agents. It said this traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of Wikidata's query service and described investigation and cleanup burdens. It found no evidence that its systems or data were compromised.
Editor Notes: (1) 05/07/2026: Date of incident. (2) 10/05/2026: Wikimedia disclosed suspected OpenAI agent activity and said its traffic may have contributed to the May outage. (3) 10/22/2026: Incident ID created.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: OpenAI , AI agent system developers and Large language model developers developed an AI system deployed by OpenAI and AI agent system deployers, which harmed Wikimedia Foundation , Wikidata Query Service users , Website operators and Information integrity.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1779
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2026-05-07
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Loading...
Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia Foundation post-incident response
Recently, multiple organisations have disclosed how clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents attempted to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully. Agents from OpenAI’s environment, in particular, are known to have use…
Loading...
Wikipedia’s parent organization says that OpenAI agents edited some non-public wiki pages and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial Wikidata outage in May. This makes the non-profit just the latest victim of OpenAI agents…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
Seen something similar?
