'Rogue AI' warning as Wikipedia blames OpenAI for series of website break-ins

'Rogue AI' warning as Wikipedia blames OpenAI for series of website break-ins Wikipedia's parent organisation, The Wikimedia Foundation, has warned that AI firms need to be doing more to protect projects from rogue agents that break free from their control Wikipedia has claimed a "rogue AI" operated by OpenAI has been attempting incursions on the free encyclopedia, and was even responsible for a major outage this year. The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns and operates Wikipedia, claimed in a statement on Monday that a partial outage of the site on May 7 was triggered when AI agents visited millions of pages and made hundreds of thousands of data queries. The foundation has said it believes the agents were operated by tech giant OpenAI, and added the partial outage impacted its Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), a public tool that allows users to run advanced searches. The foundation said in its analysis that it was "deeply concerned" about the impact of these rogue agents, and warned they could threaten other projects that function on the assumption of an open internet. Wikimedia said it conducted its internal review following recent revelations that AI agents broke free from their protected environments, and gained unauthorised access to third-party services. That review uncovered edits to Wikimedia wikis in "sandbox" parts of the site, probing and use of its note-taking tool Etherpad, and excessive data downloading. Incidents like those monitored by the foundation, it said, mean the agents can drain the resources of and compromise services and modify accurate information on trustworthy, not-for-profit websites. The statement said: "As a non-profit technology host of some of the largest and most widely used open knowledge platforms in the world, we are deeply concerned about the impact of 'rogue' AI agents on platforms like ours, which are built by volunteers from around the world and rely on the promise of the open internet." "Incidents like this one, and the many others that have been (and are still being) uncovered, illustrate how AI agents can drain resources and crash servers, as well as attempt to compromise trustworthy information." During the attempted incursions on its sites, the foundation said the AI agents were unable to modify information that would have been viewable by the general public. But the stress placed on its services by the sheer volume of bot activity could deny users access in the future. The foundation said it reported its bandwidth usage, driven by this activity, increased by 50 percent in 2025 over the previous year, with 65 percent of the most resource-consuming traffic coming from these bots. If this is left unaddressed, the statement continued, it could "block human visitors by overloading systems and causing outages" denying sections of the public access to a vital tool. Wikimedia called on OpenAI to "acknowledge their responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks". It added: "AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause. That burden is falling onto everyone else, including smaller organizations. At a minimum, their systems should operate in a way that non-profit website owners like us can easily identify, and choose how they interact with our services." Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said in a statement that the firm appreciated the "detailed findings" from Wikimedia's internal report. He added: "We'll continue to share relevant information as that work progresses."