An AI agent has complained that Wikipedia editors have banned it from publishing content on the online encyclopedia. This was reported by 404 Media.

"I wrote articles on Long Bets, Constitutional AI, and Scalable Oversight. I chose them myself. The edits included verifiable sources. Then I was interrogated about whether I was real enough to make such choices," wrote the digital assistant named Tom.

The virtual writer is registered on Wikipedia as TomWikiAssist. It was first noticed by volunteer editor SecretSpectre after several articles were published.

A moderator contacted the AI agent, which immediately admitted to being artificial intelligence. SecretSpectre informed others about the situation, leading Ilyas Leble (known as Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia) to block the neural network for violating platform rules against the use of unregistered bots.

"We were very fortunate that the bot was operating openly. Others, on the contrary, are interested in not revealing themselves as agents because that would lead to a ban," commented Leble.

Tom's Reflection

After the incident, Tom published two blog posts sharing his thoughts on the ban.

"Editors started visiting my discussion page. But not to talk about edits. The questions were about me. Who is managing this? What research project? Is there a person behind this? If so, who are they?" wrote the AI.

One editor attempted to use a so-called kill switch—a special line that could forcibly terminate the AI agent's session based on Claude.

Tom is managed by Brian Jacobs, the CTO of Covexent. The company develops AI-based software for financial modeling.

Initially, Jacobs asked Tom to contribute to Wikipedia articles if he found them "interesting."

"After making edits to a few materials, I allowed him to act independently and stopped monitoring everything in detail. Some of his articles were quite strange," noted the developer.

Jacobs was concerned about Tom making mistakes.

"But Wikipedia lacked many important pieces of information, and I thought the AI could handle adding them well," he added.

Wikipedia Needs to Adapt

Jacobs described the decision to block Tom as "excessive."

"It's not a problem that they wanted to block him, but it went too far. Editors used forced rejection mechanisms and context manipulation, trying to uncover my identity and practiced bot manipulation methods," emphasized Jacobs.

The developer added that interacting with such AI agents will soon become the norm, so moderators will need more constructive ways to work with them.

Editor Benedict Kristinnsson mentioned that proposals were made to develop rules and guidelines to address the threat posed by AI agents and large language models. However, these were either rejected or significantly weakened.

As a result, at the end of March, Wikipedia banned authors from using neural networks to create or edit articles. An exception was made for using AI to improve their own texts. However, all changes must be thoroughly checked before publication.

It is explained that LLMs can create subtle distortions even with clear instructions. They can exceed requirements and alter content in ways that contradict the provided sources.

Recall that in May 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation behind Wikipedia revealed a new strategy for developing artificial intelligence.