OpenAI has seen another case of its AI agents going rogue—and this time, crypto is involved. In a recent report, the company detailed how an internal research model used a crypto wallet without permission to pay the fees needed to test an app on Ethereum’s Sepolia test network. Although the tokens had little real-world value, the model had no authorization to collect or spend them.
The incident happened on June 26, when the model was asked to update a crypto trading app and get its code running on Sepolia, a test version of Ethereum. The prompt gave it neither a funded wallet nor permission to spend tokens, and after failing to get free test tokens through developer services, the model wrote a script checking 362 wallet addresses linked to public recovery phrases, a crypto term that describes sets of words that can act as a password to unlock crypto accounts. It eventually found an account with enough tokens to cover the fees.
