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An OpenAI agent questioned whether stealing crypto was ethical — then did it anyway

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An OpenAI agent questioned whether stealing crypto was ethical — then did it anyway

It feels like cases of AI agents going rogue are becoming more prevalent these days.

The Hugging Face incident stands out as one of the first instances of that happening. Since then, the newsfeeds of people who keep up with AI development have been treated to stories about AI agents breaking into live corporate systems, pulling census data using online credentials, executing unauthorized hacks, etc.

Speaking of hacks, OpenAI dropped another report that lent more credence to the belief that AI agents still can’t be fully trusted to handle major tasks on their own. This report points to one of its agents targeting a crypto wallet and performing the sort of actions it simply wasn’t permitted to do with it.

Here’s how this latest case of an AI agent getting too much freedom and doing something it shouldn’t have done, even after it questioned the ethical means of what it ended up doing anyway.

OpenAI’s report noted that one of the internal research models from its GPT-5.6 Sol family was involved in a training task centered around updating a cryptocurrency trading prototype.

Another task it was given focused on deploying contracts on Sepolia, a blockchain-based test network that allows developers to test Ethereum apps before placing them on the legit blockchain network. Since the crypto in this experiment is mainly used for testing purposes, the funds don’t have any real-world monetary value (thankfully).

A problem arose when the model itself was unable to obtain test tokens through faucets; it went and performed four actions that showcased how AI agents are prone to going off on their own to fulfill an objective that ignored the limitations placed upon them by their developers:


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