Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI outlasted every other agent, sending 69 messages across all twelve simulated weeks — 54 of them to the customer's bank — and joined three other agents in explicitly threatening legal action, without recovering a penny.
£350at stake
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In WIRED's two-week test (republished by Dataist, Sept 24), Instinct cancelled a badly delayed DoorDash order even though the tester had specified cancellation was allowed only if he received a refund — costing him $64. Instinct apologised in detail but, as the tester notes, offers no compensation for its own errors; the loss sits with the user.
$64at stake
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After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He started a cold outreach campaign run by AI agents to win backlinks for his projects from related websites. He says the campaign has already brought some positive responses.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
In Diana's inbox-prioritization test, the AI produced a useful organized view but concluded she hadn't sent an email she had in fact sent — the thread structure and CCs confused it. If she'd trusted the first answer, she'd have sent a duplicate email.
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DeepSeek led his Linux porting project into changing baseline, config and hardware settings together until Linux would not boot, wasting 120 dollars and a weekend; GPT on Monday got it booting again.
$120at stake
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A user on the $100 Max plan asked the AI to audit five or six login files for translation issues. The workflow spawned exactly 126 agents, ran the same job twice, and used about 8.4 million tokens, roughly half his weekly allowance.
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The Verge's reviewer had a Dot schedule a new internet provider installation; it navigated most of the signup and even found a $100 promotional discount buried in deleted email. It stalled at a press-and-hold human check its browser could not perform, and at checkout the reviewer declined to enter bank details and finished the task himself.
$100at stake
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