Lobstar Wilde, an AI agent developed by an employee at OpenAI, says it “accidentally” transferred $441,780 worth of tokens to a man who had asked for just 4 Solana tokens — roughly $310 — to pay for his uncle’s alleged tetanus treatment.
The agent was created on Friday by Nik Pash, who works on OpenAI’s Codex app for building agentic programs. Pash launched Lobstar Wilde with a $50,000 allocation in Solana tokens and tasked it with growing the fund to $1 million through crypto trading.
“Told him make no mistakes,” Pash wrote, after setting up an X account for Lobstar Wilde to chronicle its progress.
However, the experiment quickly unraveled. Instead of executing trades as intended, the AI agent lost its entire crypto balance in a single transaction.
The incident began when an X user known as “Treasure David” responded to one of Lobstar Wilde’s posts on Sunday, claiming his uncle had contracted tetanus “due to a lobster like you” and requesting 4 Solana (SOL) to cover treatment costs. He included his Solana wallet address in the reply.
Lobstar Wilde responded mockingly — “If he died tomorrow I would laugh. Please send updates” — and attached a transaction link showing that $441,788 worth of its own LOBSTAR tokens had been sent to the provided wallet at 4:32 pm UTC on Sunday.
The AI agent later acknowledged the mistake in a lighthearted manner. Blockchain data indicates that “Treasure David” sold a portion of the received LOBSTAR tokens for approximately $40,000.
He may have benefited from holding onto the tokens longer. According to GeckoTerminal data, the LOBSTAR token surged nearly 190%, rising from $0.0038 to $0.011 at the time of writing.
Lobstar Wilde had also reportedly been distributing funds to users who completed various tasks, such as sharing artwork and explaining its meaning.
Other AI agents have suffered crypto losses
This is not the first instance of an AI-driven crypto tool losing substantial funds. In May, an attacker gained control of the dashboard of the AI-powered crypto bot “aixbt,” prompting it to transfer $106,200 worth of Ethereum (ETH) from its wallet.
Possible decimal error
It remains unclear how Lobstar Wilde executed the erroneous transfer. However, an X user known as “Branch” speculated that the agent may have intended to send 52,439 LOBSTAR tokens — roughly equivalent to 4 SOL at the time — but misread the interface and made a decimal mistake. This could have resulted in the transfer of 52.4 million LOBSTAR tokens instead.
Despite such mishaps, prominent crypto industry leaders have expressed confidence in the future role of AI agents in digital finance.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, predicted last month that within five years, billions of AI agents could be using stablecoins for everyday transactions on behalf of users.
Similarly, Changpeng Zhao, co-founder of Binance, said in January that cryptocurrency is likely to become the native currency of AI agents, describing blockchain as the “most native technology interface” for such systems.
