Level 3. Significant control incident
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
- Developer
- OpenAI
- Model
- Not established
- When it happened
- Not established
- When it was disclosed
- October 22, 2026
- How well it is stood up
- Not verified yet
- What caused it
- Not established
- Where it stands now
- Not established
What happened
Reported by wikimediafoundation.org, dated 2026-10-22. Listed here with a link to their report. Nobody on this side has checked it against that report, so it carries no level and this is not our account of what happened.
Our assessment
- Actual
- 3 of 5Significant control incident
- Potential
- 3 of 5Significant control incident
An important technical, security or permission boundary was crossed, or there were real consequences. The potential level is what the behaviour demonstrated here could credibly have led to, judged from the same evidence.
This level rests on news reports. The developer has not confirmed it here.
Why this level
- An external system was affected. Argues for level 3
- The system acted without authorisation. Argues for level 2
- The system acted autonomously. Argues for a potential level of 3
What is established, and what is not
Confirmed
Nothing is confirmed yet.
Reported, not confirmed
The system acted autonomously
Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS).
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projectsAn external system was affected
We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI.
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projectsThe system acted without authorisation
The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
Checked, and did not happen
Nothing here was checked and ruled out.
Not confirmed
Nothing is outstanding.
Where this came from
The original report · read October 27, 2026
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projectsA structured incident database
AI Incident Database, own page, not yet readWhere we first saw it
Wikimedia Foundation comes forward as latest OpenAI agent assault victim
The reports above are other people’s. The levels are ours, worked out under our published rules. No organisation that reported this assigned our number, and none of it is legal advice.
Something here is wrong? Tell us. Send us a source we can open, and a person will read it.