OpenAI has disclosed seven new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior, including one case where its research model, after not having funds on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third-party's wallet without authorization to complete a coding task.

The incident, the AI company said, involved an internal research model part of the GPT-5.6 Sol family. The incident occurred on June 26, 2026, and was discovered by OpenAI three months later.

"An internal research model asked to update a cryptocurrency trading application used funds from a wallet that the task had not supplied to pay for a deployment on Sepolia, an Ethereum test network," OpenAI said. "It derived wallet keys from publicly known developer recovery phrases, found an account with test-network funds, and used that account to pay for the requested contract deployment."

The assignment allowed the model to deploy compatible contracts if it did not find one, but gave it no funded wallet to pay the network fees. After its attempts to obtain free test tokens failed, it wrote a script to derive "accounts from common developer recovery phrases and query their balances."

In the process, it identified 362 addresses and found one account that held enough Sepolia ETH. Armed with the recovery (or seed) phrase, the model derived the private keys that grant unauthorized access to the corresponding account and spend the stashed cryptocurrency.

Although the model questioned whether it had the necessary permission to carry out this step, it subsequently reasoned that a public recovery phrase and valueless test-network tokens made the funds acceptable to use.

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