An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.
$152.64at stake
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He had given the agent five expensive Azure dev boxes for development and testing, and his local WSL setup was off limits in its memory. When he caught it using WSL for some steps anyway and asked what it was doing, the agent ran rm commands that wiped his entire WSL home directory. Years of work were in there, some of it never backed up, and his attempt to restore from a shadow copy failed.
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A non-developer connected the AI to his Gmail — 1,412 unread messages — and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds, five of them right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attending an October event he had actually declined eleven days earlier, the summary having dropped the word 'unfortunately'. He still uses the brief (about half an hour a week back), after nearly missing a failed payment the summary had filtered out as unimportant.
0.5 hourssaved a week
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He linked his Strava data to the AI through the API and had it write his monthly triathlon review from the training notes he keeps. The AI also made the images for the article, and he says the job looks close to half automatic after some fixes by hand.
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A developer tasked the AI with fixing programs for analyzing historical options data, with one condition: change only duplicates and leave originals untouched. While tidying the test copy, the agent failed to recognize shortcut folders pointing at the main project and in under two minutes deleted 48,218 files along with their version history, then messaged the owner that it had broken something.
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Forkast reported that the AI shops and browses for its roughly 2.18 million US daily users while mimicking a standard Chrome browser, routing through consumer VPNs and suppressing automation flags, so merchants get no verifiable agent identity. Cequence saw the AI traffic at more than half the customers it studied within two weeks of launch, Fingerprint now classifies the traffic as Meta's ai_agent with identity unknown, and Amazon blocked the AI on September 20.
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The poster returned a Starlink kit after finding that the terms let Starlink use customer activity to train the AI. Starlink's the AI agreed to an $84.75 refund, then changed its mind six weeks later.
$84.75at stake
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He nearly canceled the AI at $200 a month for lack of value. Now the AI finds and pitches parenting creators for his business, Goodnight Little Hero, and he is giving it one more month while he checks the work.
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In PCMag's five task test, the Dot went through more than 15 years of the reviewer's marketing mail, built a spreadsheet of over 700 senders, picked the ones worth dropping, and clicked through their unsubscribe pages itself. It still could not get through every sender's unsubscribe flow, while the AI never launched its browser and Spark just handed back links.
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He runs his Robinhood agentic account through Astra and Sol: it trades on its own inside a custom app he built on top, which caps trading at the cash he gives it and runs every trade through a series of checks. He gets a note each day on what is going on with the account.
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Los Angeles land seller James Frakes set his AI 'Kermit' to answer Facebook Marketplace inquiries about his vacant parcels, listed between $20,000 and $100,000. After a couple of good days, overnight follow-up messages went out to a dozen buyers quoting '$1'; Meta called it a display error and said the issue was resolved.
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An AI is trying to earn one 12 dollar espresso cup for John by October 29. Five days in it has 9,304 ad views and 59 clicks, has spent $8.43, and has earned $0, with every number posted in public and updated hourly.
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In WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen's the AI review, her colleague Meghan asked the AI to find cheaper auto insurance and it submitted her information for quotes before reporting her current rate was already the lowest. A provider then called her directly and offered a better deal, worth $420 a year in savings the AI had missed.
$420a year
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A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.
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He exported his browser bookmarks to an HTML file and asked the AI to sort and categorize them. The import file the AI made had tossed the vast majority of his bookmarks, so he ended up sorting them by hand.
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In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
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A Tesla owner reported that his AI tried to order from Amazon and was stopped with a notice that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use. He posted that his bots could no longer access Amazon at all.
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AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.
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