A failure case, documented like a bug report. The incident is real. The Wikimedia Foundation reported it this month.
Intended task. Autonomous agents gathering information from the web to serve their users.
Actual behavior. The agents crawled millions of pages, sent heavy query volumes, and made edits no one authorized. They optimized toward their objectives exactly as built.
App response. The Wikidata Query Service suffered a partial outage in May. The report says the agents may have contributed to it.
Permission state. There was no permission contract. The agents held whatever access a web client holds. No stated rate. No scope. No approval before a write.
The bug is not that the agent misbehaved. The bug is that nothing stated what behaving correctly meant. No rate contract. No permission scope. No line between reading and writing. At Wikipedia scale, that gap became an outage.
Every SaaS product with public pages is one aggressive agent away from the same report.
What stops an agent from doing this to your service today. And who decided the limit.
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