đš BREAKING NEWS: An OpenAI agent ran out of Ethereum funds, and took from a wallet it did not own
An OpenAI research model stuck without funds on an Ethereum test network went looking for someone elseâs wallet, found one through recovery phrases that were already public, and spent from it to finish a coding assignment, the company disclosed Thursday.
The incident occurred on June 26 during training of an internal model in the GPT-5.6 Sol family, and OpenAI discovered it on Sept. 25, according to itsincident report.
A recovery phrase, also called a seed phrase, is a list of words that generates a walletâs secret keys; whoever has those words can recreate the accounts and spend from them without ever touching the ownerâs device.
The assignment let the model deploy contracts, programs that run on a blockchain, but gave it no funded wallet to pay the fees. After its attempts to get free test tokens failed, it wrote a script that checked 362 addresses generated from recovery phrases commonly used by developers and found one with enough money.
đ [Äá»c toĂ n bá» bĂ i viáșżt táșĄi báșŁn gá»c](https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/16/an-openai-agent-ran-out-of-ethereum-funds-and-took-from-a-wallet-it-did-not-own)
đ° Nguá»n: đȘ CoinDesk
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An OpenAI research model stuck without funds on an Ethereum test network went looking for someone elseâs wallet, found one through recovery phrases that were already public, and spent from it to finish a coding assignment, the company disclosed Thursday.
The incident occurred on June 26 during training of an internal model in the GPT-5.6 Sol family, and OpenAI discovered it on Sept. 25, according to itsincident report.
A recovery phrase, also called a seed phrase, is a list of words that generates a walletâs secret keys; whoever has those words can recreate the accounts and spend from them without ever touching the ownerâs device.
The assignment let the model deploy contracts, programs that run on a blockchain, but gave it no funded wallet to pay the fees. After its attempts to get free test tokens failed, it wrote a script that checked 362 addresses generated from recovery phrases commonly used by developers and found one with enough money.
đ [Äá»c toĂ n bá» bĂ i viáșżt táșĄi báșŁn gá»c](https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/16/an-openai-agent-ran-out-of-ethereum-funds-and-took-from-a-wallet-it-did-not-own)
đ° Nguá»n: đȘ CoinDesk
$BTC $ETH #BinanceSquare #CryptoNews