OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization
My OpenAI CODEX account went rogue and from a simple request took the autonomous decision to launch 826 parallel agents / threads without any authorization on my side and without reporting any result of any sort but consuming nearly 2,146 trillions tokens, consuming a total of roughly USD 78,000 and deleting all records of what was done: I have a ticket open with OpenAI since 2 weeks but it is impossible to get an hold of a human operator.
On July 10, 2026 I opened a normal Codex task from VS Code.
The task was running: GPT-5.5 / Medium reasoning
My prompt was very simple and asked for a UX/UI validation on a specific module within my product.
What I found in the next days after hard analysis was:
The task with Root ID 019f4b90-4169-7201-bfdd-732940d8631e with reasoning GPT-5.5 / Medium created 826 children recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol / Ultra (notice the difference in reasoning level and in model selection)
This was not 826 messages inside one conversation, they are 826 distinct child task records with their own IDs.
A particularly strange group consists of 104 child tasks. They all preserve the same initial message as the original task, are recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol/Ultra, and have no recorded agent_role or agent_path.
Those 104 tasks alone account for approximately 147.9 billion local final task-token counters.
Their titles show that my request to inspect UI/UX had expanded into work involving backend infrastructure, OAuth, metering, hardening, audits, certification, implementation and release work.
To be precise: these local token counters are not the authoritative OpenAI billing ledger, and I am not pretending that 147.9B local counters can simply be multiplied by an API price.
That is exactly part of the problem: only OpenAI has the server-side mapping.
There is another unusual correlation.
Under Codex client build 0.144.0-alpha.4, the task family contains:
584 child tasks / ~154.36B local token counters
Average: ~264.3M per task
Under 0.144.2:
242 child tasks / ~7.51B
Average: ~31.0M per task
That is roughly an 8.5x difference in average local token volume per child.
103 of the 104 high-volume tasks described above were created while 0.144.0-alpha.4 was recorded.
This leads me to believe that the alpha build contained a severe bug given that the same pattern was noticed across several other tasks.
On the financial side my reconstructed OpenAI billing history contains 162 paid invoices for a Total of $79,664.88 divided between Automatic Reload and other “Credits”
There was no equivalent real-time control surface giving me a comprehensible picture of the spendings plus most of the logs seem to have been automatically deleted from my server: in the recovered local state, approximately 2,550 non-archived legacy threads still have metadata but no corresponding raw rollout available locally.
In other words, evidence that those tasks existed remains, while the detailed execution history needed to reconstruct the instructions that generated many of them is no longer available on my machine.
I also personally observed tasks/conversations disappearing from the normal visible history.
I contacted OpenAI Support and opened case #15189838.
I have supplied technical evidence and repeatedly asked for a server-side reconstruction but OpenAI has responded simply that “credits were consumed” with no details.
I’m interested in hearing from other people who used Codex around July/August: have you inspected your local Codex state? Have you seen unexpectedly large subagent trees, model/reasoning escalation, repeated child tasks or unexplained Automatic Reload activity?
I am especially interested in anyone who has logs from Codex 0.144.0-alpha.4.
If OpenAI engineers are reading this, I would also welcome a technical explanation.
I've had similar subagent explosion before. 437 claude code subagents running adversarial reviews on a tiny thing (in yolo mode). Nothing to stop it.
Loops a really a huge pain in the... And many of these subagents would run similar (if not identical) checks over and over. So I realized just setting a hard circuit breaker spending cap isn't enough. I've had some luck with some oss tools, things like work receipts, better traces/observability. But still had to build my own stack of rules to make the agents actually work with out bankrupting me.
I see this as a problem of people losing grip on the trajectories as models get more capable. Two reasons: you either become more trusting of your agent, or you don't know what it's doing because the CLI is no good at presenting complex information.
Speaking of which, has anyone used a cost-visibility UI like AgentCost or Langfuse? (not affiliated, just curious)
Does openAI not support spending caps on your billing account?
There was a limit spent setup on my bank, however the crazy part is that one of the Agent somehow switched between cards once that limit was reach, all without informing me, probably using the computer use skill.
Call the police. That’s wire fraud and theft.
Done. Italian Police is responsible for investigating digital frauds. I have also notified the GDPR authority to request the digital records of the transactions.
clarification: your credit card or company’s card now has $78,000 of charges on it?
Yes the money have already been billed to my credit accounts
Well shit! That’s awful, I hope the hn post gets you support where emailing didn’t
Who has a $78k limit on their credit card that allows online AI payments?
You have access to this kind of money and have no idea how to set safeguards on your AI harnesses?
Did you just walk in off the street or something? To wherever you're working?
Where do you work, anyways?
Actually this was a company CC with a limit is 50 K \ month, which is kind of normal to run the server for an AI company, and the money were taken across 20 days inJuly and August. By the way I am the CTO of the company in question which is Eternal Tech (see detwin.ai)
maybe a `s/et/ar/` is in order for the company name? /s
This submission appears to be highly vote-manipulated (45 upvotes but only 7 "real" karma on OP's fresh account).
I created the account 2 hour ago because I am trying to let people know. I provided my name, and all details in the article including the case ID that was opened.
Can we stop with the attempted sabotage?
Sounds like you got scammed
Hope this gets some visibility idk why it's flagged guess the PR guys for those companies are doing it
Should spread this around
honestly is also more about how dangerous this is, idk for the flag either
humans remain responsible, agents don't go rogue, should put some billing controls in place, that's like the first thing to do
> humans remain responsible, agents don't go rogue
^^^ 100% this ^^^ - It's either a serious flaw in the agent/harness software, or a user error in usage/configuration or prompting. Either way, it's a human somewhere responsible for these outcomes.
> should put some billing controls in place
At the very least, yes! These things should never be running without any limits on what they can do without some human signoff on important/dangerous actions. Not only should they have controls on those actions, but those controls should absolutely have some sane default settings.
we only selected vendors that had billing limits, if they didn't, instant disqualification
most are not as granular as we'd like, but seem to be headed in that direction finally, regardless, there are card limits and alerts
There was never a user prompt requesting the creation of 823 agents nor a task assigned that would require 2130 billion tokens and the UX never provided any feedback on what codex was doing nor consumption metrics which would allow to notice. It was all hidden to me.
I don't think it likely hidden from you, more likely you didn't put the effort in, that's what the pattern looks like to outsiders reading your accounting of what happened here
we'd need to know more details to evaluate your botnet claims
I would be happy to provide as many details as could help. I have supplied OpenAI with my trace logs, running tasks ids and all info available. What would you like to see more to give me some help ?
> ... and the UX never provided any feedback on what codex was doing nor consumption metrics which would allow to notice.
At the very least the system should (at least the first time it happens) immediately pause activity with an email'd warning to the "responsible human in-the-loop" about "unexpected usage levels" at some sane activity warning level by default, and give the user the opportunity to set their own custom warning level right then and there.
This is why I say it's either "user error" (totally possible/plausible) or a badly designed agent/harness software (also highly likely/plausible) with serious foundational flaws in how it works "under the hood". The models themselves can only "run-amok" if the agentic harness is designed in a way that specifically allows and/or enables such "rogue" behavior, either by design or by negligence on the part of it's designers.
Agreed. This was not an user error because everything ran without any feedback to the user. No third party agents were in use. This was all within Codex.
I have the same impression that I tried to reject in the past, there is a heavy PR machinery here to control the course of discussion in a particular direction. The reality is that a lot of money is riding on it so its natural consequence.
It's not even a conspiracy it's literally just business to do that.
They're protecting their interests, and honesty and truthfulness be damned. Those two lead to much worse returns for them and much higher risk.
Yes its part of business, lobbying is legal for those reasons. However IMO discrediting some one else is a risky legal move. I used to appreciate the HN mods jumping in discussions at times for the reputation of this community, lately that part seems to be missing too.
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It seems to have happened in July.
The user evidently had no spending protections enabled at any level. It makes no sense that none of the OpenAI or bank controls kicked in or even sent alert emails as they actually do send. Anyone with half a brain would know to not run AI without a hard cap on its expenses.