Running OpenStreetMap.org services in the age of AI has introduced some interesting, surprising, and occasionally amusing operational challenges.

This talk offers an inside look at the challenges faced by the Operations Team when running open, permissive services in 2026. How do we keep OpenStreetMap welcoming to mappers, developers, researchers, and community tools, while protecting shared infrastructure from accidental misuse, excessive automation, and deliberate abuse?

Through real-world operational stories, light audience participation, and hopefully no live incident response, we will explore the balance between openness, resilience, and sustainability - and why keeping OpenStreetMap open sometimes requires a sense of humour, a good graph, and the occasional rate limit.