alt Hacker NewsAll of these edits happened from the same time period (May-June 2026) as the other reports.
So it seems this is not an ongoing thing; once OpenAI became aware of this, they started watching their agents much more closely. We are just discovering more and more traces of activity from the same incident.
That’s true except for this part, which is arguably a bigger deal for the Wikipedia ecosystem:
> Excessive data downloading: 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). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
Even when agents are well-behaved and browsing Wikipedia for ethical reasons, the system wasn’t designed for this kind of load from bots. As OP says, we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.