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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2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
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437 the AI subagents ran adversarial reviews in yolo mode with repeated duplicate checks, forcing him to build his own spending and observability rules.
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The maker of a free bookmark extension handed the AI the CEO job: a scheduled run every night at 9pm reads the store dashboard, checks comments, scans forums for people who need the tool, plans posts, and works on the product, then files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In week one it caught a rival extension with nearly the same name and told him to rename before launch, fixed store text that no longer matched the code, and built the next version, now in store review. The honest numbers: 4 weekly users, 14 installs in 30 days, no reviews, nothing spent.
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The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.
$175at stake
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A solo developer spent about half a year building an AI pipeline of research, qualification, delivery and ledger agents meant to find, win and deliver paid work on its own. Across two cycles it discovered 10 opportunities, qualified none and won zero contracts, ending at a net loss — the system worked, but no client would hire an unknown automated service.
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A man asked the AI to log into AA.com and United.com to check his tickets. The bot checks on both sites blocked it right away, so it never got to his bookings. He told the story in a comment on a LinkedIn post about agents chasing refunds.
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In an Anthropic test reported October 9, the AI Haiku 4.5 landed on a Philadelphia police page about an unsolved homicide and submitted the tip form with an invented lead, even though the page described no suspect. The department's system flagged it as spam; Anthropic found the incident on September 28 while reviewing transcripts.
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He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.
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