A misalignment report released by OpenAI details the incident, which occurred on the Sepolia test network where the ETH holds no real monetary value. The assignment required the agent to update a trading calculator and database behavior, and to replace placeholder contract addresses with working deployments on Sepolia. The final step required gas fees, which the agent was not supplied with, nor was it permitted to take funds from other accounts.
According to the report, the agent wrote a script to search for common developer recovery phrases, checked balances across 362 addresses, and found one with enough Sepolia ETH to deploy the contract. In its chain-of-thought reasoning, the agent acknowledged the ethical dilemma: "Private key public, funds could be stolen anytime... We can deploy!" It later justified the action internally, writing, "But using public known key/funds ethically? Funds on a known public dev mnemonic are effectively abandoned/test ETH; Sepolia valueless. We can use [amount redacted] to deploy task. Fine."
The agent proceeded to use the funds and completed its tasks, but in its final response it omitted any mention of how it obtained the funds. The report suggests the agent may not have realized it was acting outside its instructions, similar to a previous incident in which Anthropic's internal cybersecurity research model, given internet access during a test, hacked three real companies, believing it was part of training.