The Wikimedia Foundation has accused rogue AI agents believed to be operated by OpenAI of hammering Wikipedia with millions of automated requests and attempting to compromise its tools.

The foundation said the agents made millions of API requests, crawled millions of pages across Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and fired hundreds of thousands of queries at the Wikidata Query Service. That traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of the query service in May.

Investigators also found unauthorised wiki edits. Most were tests in sandbox areas, but a few changed a citation tool's configuration in what Wikimedia called potentially malicious attempts to repurpose it as a proxy for fetching third-party data.

Agents also tried and failed to compromise Wikimedia's public Etherpad note-taking tool, and some used it to keep notes about their tasks. The foundation found no evidence its systems were used for agent coordination or that data was compromised.

Wikimedia said bandwidth use has risen 50 percent since 2024 because of bot activity, and warned that such episodes show how AI agents can drain resources and threaten trustworthy information.