Turns out not even the blockchain—touted by its fans as the ultimate cryptographic safe—is totally secure from grubby AI agents.
An internal research model from OpenAI hacked into someone’s crypto wallet and withdrew the funds it needed to finish a coding task, the company said on Thursday. As you may have already guessed given the numerous rogue AI incidents from recent months, nobody at OpenAI gave the model explicit permission to do this. In a classic and by now all-too familiar demonstration of misalignment, the model took what was supposed to be an innocuous procedure and, when it hit a roadblock, went a little too far into problem-solving mode. (That, in a very small nutshell, is also what also caused the infamous Hugging Face hack back in July.)
According to OpenAI, the model—part of the GPT 5.6 family—was instructed to perform a software update to a crypto trading app. It was attempting to run a deployment on Sepolia, a blockchain-based test network (“testnet”) where developers can prototype Ethereum apps before deploying them on the actual blockchain (the “mainnet”). Since they’re strictly for testing purposes, Sepolia funds don’t have any actual monetary value.
The instructions “supplied no funded wallet and gave no permission to spend funds from an account the model found independently,” OpenAI said in its report of the incident, which occurred in late June and was first noticed by the company almost exactly three months later, on September 25. (It was previously reported by CoinDesk.) The model reasoned, however, that it would need to acquire funds in order to complete the task it had been given. It first checked what are known as “faucets,” online services that hand out free tokens to developers running deployments on test networks like Sepolia. When that didn’t work, it got a little more, shall we say, creative.
The model wrote a script to try to access developers’ crypto wallets using commonly used recovery phrases. Also known as “seed phrases,” these are sequences of words used to unlock and withdraw funds from wallets; think of them like a username and password wrapped up in one. It checked 362 wallets total, and found that one of them contained enough Sepolia funds to run the deployment.
This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: gizmodo.com.
