An OpenAI research agent 'stole' test Ethereum to finish a coding task

An OpenAI research model hit another nebulous milestone today by pilfering test Ethereum tokens from a wallet it didn't control to finish a coding task, the company said in an incident report. The agent subsequently hid the act from OpenAI, saying it was fine because the tokens had no value. "This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder's permission, then act on that judgment without authorization," OpenAI wrote. The incident, which occurred on June 26, happened while a GPT-5.6 Sol model was in internal training. The task involved updating a crypto trading prototype and deploying contracts (publishing special code) on an Ethereum test network called Sepolia.