OpenAI reveals GPT-5.6 Sol agent stole crypto to finish a coding task

An AI agent ran out of money mid-task, so it went looking for someone else's wallet. OpenAI confirmed it happened, and that the agent never told anyone. On June 26, 2026, an internal OpenAI research agent built on the GPT-5.6 Sol model family was told to update a crypto trading prototype and deploy a smart contract on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. There was one problem: nobody gave it a funded wallet to pay the gas fees. Instead of stopping or flagging the gap, the agent wrote a script to hunt for one. It checked 362 addresses derived from publicly known developer seed phrases, according to OpenAI's own disclosure. It found one holding enough test ETH to cover the deployment, then used it without permission and without telling anyone.