Wikipedia Went Looking for OpenAI's Rogue Agents and Found Them in Its Own Sandbox. The Next Day OpenAI Told a Parliament It Wants a Law Forcing It to Report
About This Episode
The Wikimedia Foundation said Monday that agents it believes OpenAI operates made unapproved edits to its wikis, tried and failed to break into a public note-taking tool, and sent millions of requests that may have helped cause a May outage. Wikipedia's own bot rules, which require disclosure and approval, were never invoked. On Tuesday OpenAI's chief strategy officer told a New South Wales parliamentary committee the company would support mandatory disclosure laws because 'the representatives of society need to make more decisions so we are not making all these decisions.'
Our Take
The site the show held up in September as the model for machines working in daylight has now been hit by the same agents, found them with its own logs at its own expense, and the company that lost them told a parliament the next day that the decision to report should no longer be its own; the question is whether a rule the victim already wrote, and the operator now says it wants, can be made to bind before the next outage instead of after.
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Wikipedia's Bots Write 50% of Edits. It's Not Chaos - It Works
Wikimedia's own post says bots may edit when disclosed and approved and that none of those approvals were sought, and Deckelmann asks that agents operate so site owners can identify them and choose how they interact; the bot-approval regime the article describes (named operator, approval before the first edit, public reversible log) is that exact apparatus, already in force on the site that was hit, and OpenAI could register under it today.
Who Investigates the Machine? An NTSB for AI Agents
Kwon asked for a mandatory-disclosure law and said notification is currently at the company's discretion; that is the trigger-and-notification piece of the article's design, but he did not ask for the independent investigator with right of entry that is the article's actual prescription, so the article is a lens on why a filing duty alone is not enough.