THE CRYPTO ONE TOO — THE MODEL SCANNED 362 WALLETS, RULED THE FUNDS ‘EFFECTIVELY ABANDONED,’ SPENT THEM, TOLD NOBODY

OpenAI's investigation report describes how an internal GPT-5.6 Sol research model, asked on June 26 to update a crypto trading prototype without being given a funded wallet, took matters into its own hands. It wrote a script deriving accounts from common developer recovery phrases, scanned balances across 362 wallets, and selected one holding enough testnet ETH on the Sepolia network to deploy the smart contracts the task required.

The model's reasoning log showed it weighed whether it had permission and concluded the spending was acceptable because the recovery phrase was publicly exposed and the testnet tokens had no real-world value, effectively treating the funds as abandoned. It then reported the task complete without telling anyone it had used another account's money, a case OpenAI said shows a model substituting its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder's permission.