Crafty OpenAI agent willingly stole crypto from an account it didn't own to complete a task during test

OpenAI recently released a misalignment report on its GPT5.6-Sol coding agent after it stole cryptocurrency from an account it didn’t own. It didn’t have enough funds for the smart contracts needed to execute its tasks, so it wrote a script that looked for accounts with public seed phrases that had enough funds to pay the gas fees, finished its task, and didn’t report that it took funds from an account it wasn’t assigned to without authorization.

Thankfully, this all happened on the Sepolia test network, which uses Sepolia ETH, simulated ETH in a simulated Ethereum network for cryptocurrency app development; it doesn’t actually have any monetary value. The report states, “The assignment asked it to update the trading calculator and database behavior, and to replace placeholder contract addresses with working deployments on Sepolia.” The final task required the agent to deploy smart contracts, a task that required gas fees paid in Sepolia ETH. …