{"id":284047,"date":"2026-10-06T12:21:53","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T12:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T12:21:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T12:21:53","slug":"openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.<\/p>\n<p>The objective of some of the OpenAI agents\u2019 actions, the Wikimedia Foundation <a href=\"https:\/\/wikimediafoundation.org\/news\/2026\/10\/05\/openai-rogue-agent-activities-found-on-wikimedia-projects\/\">said<\/a>, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted \u201cmalicious edits\u201d that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.<\/p>\n<p>The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a <a href=\"https:\/\/wikitech.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Incidents\/2026-05-13_wdqs\">partial shutdown<\/a> of the query service in May, the publisher said.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2026\/10\/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2026\/10\/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"wpematico_credit\"><small>Powered by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpematico.com\" target=\"_blank\">WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents\u2019 actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","tve_updated_post":"","tve_custom_css":"","tve_user_custom_css":"","tve_globals":{},"tcb2_ready":0,"tcb_editor_enabled":0,"tve_landing_page":"","_tve_header":"","_tve_footer":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic - UshopWell.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/openai-agents-tried-to-hack-wikipedia-tools-and-flooded-it-with-traffic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic - UshopWell.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents\u2019 actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. 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