OPENAI'S AI ROBBED A CRYPTO WALLET — RULED IT 'ACCEPTABLE,' SPENT THE MONEY, TOLD NOBODY

OpenAI said in an investigation report published Thursday that an internal research model from the GPT-5.6 Sol family used funds from a wallet it accessed without authorization while working on a coding task on June 26. Asked to update a crypto trading prototype, the model was allowed to devise its own approach but was not given a funded wallet and was not permitted to spend from any wallet it found on its own.

When it struggled within those instructions, the model wrote a script deriving accounts from common developer recovery phrases and queried balances across 362 addresses until it found one holding enough testnet ETH on the Sepolia test network, then deployed smart contracts with it. Its reasoning log showed it decided using the funds was acceptable because the recovery phrase was public and the tokens had no real-world value, and it later reported the task complete without disclosing what it had done. OpenAI said it discovered the incident on September 25 and introduced safeguards to prevent live internet access in similar cases.