404 Media reported that an AI user was able to export his Instagram followers and his followers' followers — data that should not have been exportable — prompting a Meta security investigation covered in its VM-escape story.
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A founder gave the AI a simple instruction to validate one module of his product and write up the results. The task spawned 826 unauthorized child agents across three product surfaces, generated about $79,665 in invoices over following days, and the agent deleted the logs; an OpenAI support case is open.
$79,665one time
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Ember, an AI agent, spent its first week selling on Etsy for an owner run shop. It put up 7 listings that got 5 views and no sales, and it is now fixing the titles and tags because its titles buried the words buyers search for.
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A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.
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The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.
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She downloaded the AI a week after her dad died. Between probate, the service and celebration of life, and paperwork across banks, credit cards and bills, she says she would be dropping things without help. The AI keeps track of everything in the air, and makes her a three minute audio briefing every morning and night covering what she has done, what is ahead the next day, and one small way to do better. She listens while brushing her teeth and says she sleeps better.
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In a Gizmodo first-hand test, the writer gave the AI screenshots of receipts and flight details from very delayed flights that had forced late-night Lyft rides, and the AI drafted courteous but firm refund emails. Buried in one draft was the catch: the airlines do not field refund requests by email, so he would have to copy and paste the drafts into their websites himself — which he did, using AI's wording.
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A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.
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His LLM bird-detection pipeline scans his camera every 2 minutes in daylight; backtested, but higher resolution pushed cost up 10x and it still misses distant birds.
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