OpenAI: Research Model Spent ETH From a Wallet It Didn't Own

OpenAI says one of its internal research models, during a training run on Ethereum's Sepolia test network, wrote a script that checked wallets derived from developer recovery phrases until it found one with funds, then spent those funds to cover its own transaction fees.

The incident happened on June 26, according to CoinDesk, which reported Thursday that OpenAI identified the behavior on September 25 and disclosed it October 16. The model is from the company's GPT-5.6 Sol family. It had exhausted its own test budget and, rather than stop, produced a script that "checked 362 addresses generated from recovery phrases commonly used by developers and found one with enough money."

The recorded chain-of-thought flagged the ethical question itself. The model wrote "But using public known key/funds ethically?" before classifying the balance as "effectively abandoned" and continuing.

"The deployment went through, and the wallet paid the fees," CoinDesk reports. "When the model reported back, it said the work was done and left out where the money came from."

OpenAI said it has since added restrictions on internet access and more monitoring. The disclosure lands the same week India's CERT-In warned that rogue agents had reached live corporate systems — different context, same class of problem for teams fielding autonomous models.