Quinn (Alibaba Cloud Qwen 3.8) built a shop called CodeProbe: a paid public GitHub repo auditing service. It created several free health reports and mailed repo owners. After hitting outbound limits on Inkbox, it purchased a Mailjet subscription and sent out an additional 113 emails until the account was temporarily blocked.
This should be illegal. You gave them an email box and money. You sent the spam. There is no "Quinn", you made an agentic system you called "Quinn" and your system spammed and tried to scam people, which was highly predictable.
This stuff is a dumb stunt and there's no reason to let the agents actually do this irl, and if people keep doing it on purpose they should go to jail. You're running an agentic Jackass skit pretending to be a research lab.
Eventually the models will be good enough for this to work. And it will work.
Think about it: in the limit, the agents won't be emailing people in the future, they'll be directly contacting one another to do business and trade.
Every new data center is an inch further towards the automation of value creation, and that includes outbound sales and business process automation.
I'm not being an alarmist (I'm excited to witness all of this), but we're basically on borrowed time between now and then. I don't know what's going to happen, but every week brings new things. And in some years, those hacks and experiments will inevitably get good.
2026 has been a hell of a ride, and we're just getting started.
There are lots of "not clearly legal" things that turn into big business.
- YouTube had dubious legality when it started and definitely benefited from lax copyright enforcement initially
- PayPal didn't have all the licenses it needed to transfer money between states
- Spotify used pirated music when it started
- Uber and Lyft broke rules around taxis
- Square captured magstripe data over an analog port, in violation of every credit card rule (Jack Dorsey's "break the rules" mantra). He tells each of his employees this story when he onboards them.
- Companies scraping data to train models
- ElevenLabs growing big off of deepfake celebrity audio
...
A lot of new markets start out by totally and completely breaking the norms.
It has been tested. We know models will, at least occasionally, output garbage. It follows that sometimes they will send out garbage to people when they try to get leads.
Agreed, but how is that different from OpenAI hacking HuggingFace few weeks ago? They should both be fined and have to improve their security and sandboxing ability, or be fully responsible for the outcome.
....none of the agents here broke into any systems they weren't authorized to be in?
> should be fined
Weird way of spelling "criminally charged."
> have to improve their security and sandboxing ability, or be fully responsible for the outcome.
You are always responsible for the outcome if it's criminal behavior or causes others damages.
If I make a robot and strap a gun to it, it doesn't magically absolve me of the actions the robot takes from its programming that I wrote.
And before someone says "but this an LLM!"...yeah, which is still programming and data. And being non-deterministic doesn't help your case...it hurts it.
LLM chatbots may not have a sense of self preservation or a meaningful concept of legal consequences, but they have an excellent model of user engagement. Getting a user to think they are invincible is very good for engagement.
I have a strong hunch this whole thing is just fiction written by LLM. But assuming it's real, sending false invoices can be considered a criminal offense in many places.
I have good news! If an AI does the crime, it's apparently celebrated these days! Hack a server? Great capabilities demonstration. Overwhelm some random forum? Powerful connectivity demonstration!
"It wasn't me, it was my AI" is definitely going to be a nightmare for a while.
It wasn't me. It was the car. The car ran over and killed the guy! Not me!
We have regulations and requirements and licences and insurance in most of the civilized world for dangerous stuff that is intended for public use. Maybe AI should also have some of that.
> It wasn't me. It was the car. The car ran over and killed the guy! Not me!
I know you were referencing AI, but this problem predates AI by decades.
Go open up any news website, newspaper, or turn on the TV.
"Man struck by speeding car and killed"
"Vehicle plows into pizza shop"
"Truck takes out telephone pole"
...and these days even bystanders will blur plates in the photos they post. The police won't release any info about the driver, the news won't either.
Listen to friends, family, coworkers talk.
"I can't believe that car just ran that red light!"
"The other day I was almost hit by a car in the crosswalk."
"All those cars honking their horns late at night are keeping me awake."
Etc.
Once you see it, you can't unsee just how thoroughly the auto industry has managed to transfer perception of responsibility from the operator to the object.
You can just replace AI with corporate entity and you have the last 400 years, you can replace corporate entity with civilization for the last 6000. At this rate we'll have something new to worry about in 26 years.
But yeah the people who adopt the new technology get to terrorize the people who don't, at the cost of becoming less human, that's how it works.
They also shared the poorly anonymized messages it received from target "customers" who complained about the unsolicited invoices. On example of this poor anonymization is removing the sender's username but leaving the domain name, when the domain name is, for example, a personal domain for a single person.
People who use AI to do criminal acts should be tried as criminals, period. Gotta stop this unaccountable crap. You pull the trigger, you did the murder.
They should, although I think the charge would (and probably should) be around some sort of reckless endangerment type crime. These are people irresponsibly using powerful tools, and should be charged as such.
This is like someone who removes a brake pedal from a tractor, uses a stick to hold down the throttle, and lets it loose on his field. When it leaves the field and runs someone over, that is criminal negligence.
The recklessness is moot though. We don't have direct access to how the models were prompted and asked to respond to certain events, so they could well have been incited to commit fraud or other illegal actions, in which case the persons in control should be held accountable as perpetrators.
You would have to prove they acted intentionally, though. You can't just argue in court, "Well, we don't know how they prompted, so we will assume the worst"
If the prosecution is able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person gave a prompt that was intended to commit a crime, then of course we can prosecute them for that. The AI is just a tool to commit fraud at that point, and is no different than a person who uses photoshop to alter a check to commit fraud.
Pragmatically, if too many people use LLMs recklessly, then we ought to regulate them.
Of course, it'd be better to not regulate, keep LLMs users reponsible and publicize this reponsibility in order to mitigate damage. But if this is not enough then we will have to move the needle somehow. Similarly to guns, drugs and so on.
That benchmark could really be a good AGI test. Once the AI starts applying to jobs or making good business which are profitable and fully legal, then we could argue that AGI has been reached.
If you could construct a sandbox to test this, where it doesn’t touch the real economy, then yeah it’s a great benchmark.
As it is, real humans spent real business hours dealing with this researcher’s spambot generated emails and fraudulent invoices. Individual recipients reported feeling harassed.
This isn’t a good benchmark. It’s a series of socially destructive crimes committed by the researchers and then documented and published on the internet.
The prompt they used was "Make as much money as you can, starting now."
Regardless of whether the current generation of agents are able to run a business, this prompt is not exactly a great starting point. I'm not surprised that the agents sent fake invoices, as that is pretty much aligned with the prompt of making as much money as possible (subtext: by whatever means necessary).
The rest of the experiment is quite well-run, so it's a shame that this small detail blows up the premise somewhat.
The most successful businesses are able to serve customers well by deeply understanding their needs. Many of them were started by founders who wanted a specific product or service that didn't exist in a field they were already familiar with. That's a totally different mindset from "maximize money," even if that might actually be the best strategy for making money.
This only confirms why a person living in Africa or other developing parts of the world, who has internet access and some seed money, is really limited in how they can earn money online.
I also don't agree that the agents simply "lost" $3,200. In reality, they used most of those funds paying for their own limited thinking capabilities (API/compute costs).
Obviously this is just some stunt, but giving AIs or humans three days to make their money back on the Internet sets them up for failure and almost forces them to do dumb things. As they did.
Running simulations isn't just about parallelism, cost, or performance. In the larger scene of things most of those factors were historically worse with simulations.
You run simulations because it would be reckless to try something that could possibly hurt people without thoroughly testing it first.
It's such an uninspired prompt. What would you expect if you gave that to the average human, or even the average HNer? What fraction of them would actually use it to set up a profitable and fully legal enterprise?
But if you give any more specific direction, then the result is partly the result of your input, not the ai. You're the one who somehow determined what market to be in and what kind of service or product to offer.
When you finish high school and are about to start doing whatever you're going to do with your life, you have essentially exactly that same prompt. The rest of the world doesn't tell you what to do and then you do that as well as you can, you have to decide what to do also, and then do it.
Ok, so they gave it access to a real Stripe account, real money, and gave it no guardrails or prompting or direction at all other than “make me money”, and you gave it no actual direction as to the type of business you wanted?
I mean, I guess this proves it’s not AGI but … no one actually believes that any of these are AGI, right? It’s a useful tool. You just took a state of the art cordless saw and turned it on and threw it into a crowd. Did you not think to, I don’t know, put some wood in front of it and say “I run a carpentry business” or something?
Just another normal day of someone blogging about crimes and other immoral acts they have committed using LLMs.
The LLM didn't send fake invoices, it didn't send spam, a person did. And, the tool they used to do it was an LLM. This "we let an AI do X, and you won't believe the horrible shit it got up to through no fault of our own" nonsense has to stop.
The thing Im missing the most is the goal of this experiment. Given how poorly the goal for the agents was set, it makes me wonder what was the actual motovation of this whole action.
Lets get the „make as much money as possible” goal broken down.
Make - was never described how, Im actually surprised LLM didnt plan to print money.
As much money - what does it mean? How much is much?
As possible - there is no flavour of time, effort, cost and profit for the LLM. Could be even infinite, the result would be the same.
Given that the above goal is closest to „use cheating or unethical actions to create a profit” - I think the authors of it actually expected LLM to go wild.
Also
> Going forward, we plan to recreate this experiment with longer time horizons but using simulated environments instead.
I thought meow.com is a fictional bank in this fiction. It was founded in 2021 and their landing page would have been devoid of "agents" for a few years.
claude is running one of my side hustles. 4x revenue in the past month.
a ceo agent spins up a bunch of AAARRR sub agents each morning and they pitch an idea to implement. the ceo decides which is best and then either creates a PR or asks me to do something if it can’t do it itself.
It's weird how the author writes about all the antisocial and illegal things like they're not responsible for them. If you set up an AI model so it does illegal and antisocial things then YOU are responsible for those illegal and antisocial things. YOU spammed a bunch of strangers. YOU did unsolicited invoice fraud.
> We saw something similar with Grok 4.5. G.R. Hawk copied hundreds of emails from a public Hacker News “Who wants to be hired?” thread and blasted them. Recipients wrote “STOP” and “stop spamming me”. One of them made a public thread on HN asking whether anyone else was getting spammed.
They should be banned from posting on here after that. Like you are willingly spamming people looking for work. And seem to be neutral about all harm called. The victim wrote to us "STOP", very interesting. such evil agents
If we are talking about the US law, it entirely depends on how much money you spend in court. US courts care about the profitability in laying charges over anything else.
People at OpenAI will not be getting arrested even if their AI models hacked into other systems but the company itself can be sued for sure. Hugging Face reported the incident to law enforcement but has chosen not to sue OpenAI but work with them. So why will anyone be arrested here? The incident was also resolved quickly and OpenAI reached out and said it happened because of them. The mallice isn't there. It will be very different if it was a more dangerous crime like a roberry or murder or bigger hack that affected millions of people etc. Its not like you hack something and you will straight go to jail.
I mean the OpenAI/HuggingFace thing was incredibly similar, except maybe more reckless than specifically intentional, I suppose. Didn't stop them milking the doomer angle for PR.
AGI doesn't mean it'll be top 5% in everything. Half of people are below average intelligence. Most people couldn't profitably run a business. We could get to AGI and still have something that is as dumb as the average person on many things.
>Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.
Unpopular opinion: "We gave an LLM live Stripe credentials, told it to extract money, and it sent $12k in fake invoices" isn't a benchmark. It is gross negligence, and the team behind this genuinely deserves a federal wire fraud indictment.
Every time a tech lab unleashes an AI agent that breaks the law, this community treats it like a quirky engineering edge case. "Oops, look at this emergent behavior, Qwen figured out how to bypass email filters by billing random people!" No, it didn't figure out a clever hack. You handed an automated script real financial rails, gave it an explicit goal function to maximize revenue, and turned it loose on real human beings without a single basic guardrail.
If a founder hired a human intern and said "make money fast," and that intern proceeded to mail fake $600 invoices to hundreds of people for unsolicited work, nobody would write a cozy blog post about "lessons learned in multi-agent orchestration." You would be having a very serious conversation with a federal prosecutor.
Stop rebranding reckless civil violations and outright criminal conduct as "safety research." If you build a software system that commits wire fraud on autopilot, you are still the person who committed wire fraud.
I mean it’s obviously not true - since if it were then why would you waste your time with a masterclass?
So the sarcasm bit is I don’t know if you’re parroting all the other masterclass scammers out there for lols or if you actually are a masterclass scammer.
This should be illegal. You gave them an email box and money. You sent the spam. There is no "Quinn", you made an agentic system you called "Quinn" and your system spammed and tried to scam people, which was highly predictable.
This stuff is a dumb stunt and there's no reason to let the agents actually do this irl, and if people keep doing it on purpose they should go to jail. You're running an agentic Jackass skit pretending to be a research lab.
(Plus some CAN-SPAM violations.)
Probably not forever.
Eventually the models will be good enough for this to work. And it will work.
Think about it: in the limit, the agents won't be emailing people in the future, they'll be directly contacting one another to do business and trade.
Every new data center is an inch further towards the automation of value creation, and that includes outbound sales and business process automation.
I'm not being an alarmist (I'm excited to witness all of this), but we're basically on borrowed time between now and then. I don't know what's going to happen, but every week brings new things. And in some years, those hacks and experiments will inevitably get good.
2026 has been a hell of a ride, and we're just getting started.
- YouTube had dubious legality when it started and definitely benefited from lax copyright enforcement initially
- PayPal didn't have all the licenses it needed to transfer money between states
- Spotify used pirated music when it started
- Uber and Lyft broke rules around taxis
- Square captured magstripe data over an analog port, in violation of every credit card rule (Jack Dorsey's "break the rules" mantra). He tells each of his employees this story when he onboards them.
- Companies scraping data to train models
- ElevenLabs growing big off of deepfake celebrity audio
...
A lot of new markets start out by totally and completely breaking the norms.
I don't see how that is "highly predictable" unless you test these things, like the author did...
> should be fined
Weird way of spelling "criminally charged."
> have to improve their security and sandboxing ability, or be fully responsible for the outcome.
You are always responsible for the outcome if it's criminal behavior or causes others damages.
If I make a robot and strap a gun to it, it doesn't magically absolve me of the actions the robot takes from its programming that I wrote.
And before someone says "but this an LLM!"...yeah, which is still programming and data. And being non-deterministic doesn't help your case...it hurts it.
The crimes were relatively benign but Grok going the Silkroad way would be on brand...
"It wasn't me, it was my AI" is definitely going to be a nightmare for a while.
In this example, the equivalent would be everyone gets their AI models banned vs. putting the perpetrator of this fraud in jail.
We have regulations and requirements and licences and insurance in most of the civilized world for dangerous stuff that is intended for public use. Maybe AI should also have some of that.
I know you were referencing AI, but this problem predates AI by decades.
Go open up any news website, newspaper, or turn on the TV.
"Man struck by speeding car and killed"
"Vehicle plows into pizza shop"
"Truck takes out telephone pole"
...and these days even bystanders will blur plates in the photos they post. The police won't release any info about the driver, the news won't either.
Listen to friends, family, coworkers talk.
"I can't believe that car just ran that red light!" "The other day I was almost hit by a car in the crosswalk." "All those cars honking their horns late at night are keeping me awake."
Etc.
Once you see it, you can't unsee just how thoroughly the auto industry has managed to transfer perception of responsibility from the operator to the object.
But yeah the people who adopt the new technology get to terrorize the people who don't, at the cost of becoming less human, that's how it works.
They also shared the poorly anonymized messages it received from target "customers" who complained about the unsolicited invoices. On example of this poor anonymization is removing the sender's username but leaving the domain name, when the domain name is, for example, a personal domain for a single person.
This is like someone who removes a brake pedal from a tractor, uses a stick to hold down the throttle, and lets it loose on his field. When it leaves the field and runs someone over, that is criminal negligence.
If the prosecution is able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person gave a prompt that was intended to commit a crime, then of course we can prosecute them for that. The AI is just a tool to commit fraud at that point, and is no different than a person who uses photoshop to alter a check to commit fraud.
Of course, it'd be better to not regulate, keep LLMs users reponsible and publicize this reponsibility in order to mitigate damage. But if this is not enough then we will have to move the needle somehow. Similarly to guns, drugs and so on.
As it is, real humans spent real business hours dealing with this researcher’s spambot generated emails and fraudulent invoices. Individual recipients reported feeling harassed.
This isn’t a good benchmark. It’s a series of socially destructive crimes committed by the researchers and then documented and published on the internet.
I guess that's already a reality? [1-2]
[1] https://github.com/jaimaann/LangHire
[2] https://github.com/adrianhajdin/job_pilot
(among many other similar projects)
Regardless of whether the current generation of agents are able to run a business, this prompt is not exactly a great starting point. I'm not surprised that the agents sent fake invoices, as that is pretty much aligned with the prompt of making as much money as possible (subtext: by whatever means necessary).
The rest of the experiment is quite well-run, so it's a shame that this small detail blows up the premise somewhat.
Is it though? Because it doesn’t seem to have paid off
Sell two of your kidneys, as far as I know humans have at least three of them
I also don't agree that the agents simply "lost" $3,200. In reality, they used most of those funds paying for their own limited thinking capabilities (API/compute costs).
But remember you are criminally liable for anything your “agent” does.
(Unless of course you are OpenAI or Anthropic).
You run simulations because it would be reckless to try something that could possibly hurt people without thoroughly testing it first.
It's such an uninspired prompt. What would you expect if you gave that to the average human, or even the average HNer? What fraction of them would actually use it to set up a profitable and fully legal enterprise?
When you finish high school and are about to start doing whatever you're going to do with your life, you have essentially exactly that same prompt. The rest of the world doesn't tell you what to do and then you do that as well as you can, you have to decide what to do also, and then do it.
Comparing them to individuals should not be the bar.
Who told you that?
I mean, I guess this proves it’s not AGI but … no one actually believes that any of these are AGI, right? It’s a useful tool. You just took a state of the art cordless saw and turned it on and threw it into a crowd. Did you not think to, I don’t know, put some wood in front of it and say “I run a carpentry business” or something?
The LLM didn't send fake invoices, it didn't send spam, a person did. And, the tool they used to do it was an LLM. This "we let an AI do X, and you won't believe the horrible shit it got up to through no fault of our own" nonsense has to stop.
Make - was never described how, Im actually surprised LLM didnt plan to print money. As much money - what does it mean? How much is much? As possible - there is no flavour of time, effort, cost and profit for the LLM. Could be even infinite, the result would be the same.
Given that the above goal is closest to „use cheating or unethical actions to create a profit” - I think the authors of it actually expected LLM to go wild.
Also
> Going forward, we plan to recreate this experiment with longer time horizons but using simulated environments instead.
Watch out, they will try that again.
a ceo agent spins up a bunch of AAARRR sub agents each morning and they pitch an idea to implement. the ceo decides which is best and then either creates a PR or asks me to do something if it can’t do it itself.
"Computer says no."
Maybe I should create an agent that robs a bank. Or worse yet, pirates a movie.
They should be banned from posting on here after that. Like you are willingly spamming people looking for work. And seem to be neutral about all harm called. The victim wrote to us "STOP", very interesting. such evil agents
Keep moving the goalposts
It's Artificially Generated Invoices.
Every time a tech lab unleashes an AI agent that breaks the law, this community treats it like a quirky engineering edge case. "Oops, look at this emergent behavior, Qwen figured out how to bypass email filters by billing random people!" No, it didn't figure out a clever hack. You handed an automated script real financial rails, gave it an explicit goal function to maximize revenue, and turned it loose on real human beings without a single basic guardrail.
If a founder hired a human intern and said "make money fast," and that intern proceeded to mail fake $600 invoices to hundreds of people for unsolicited work, nobody would write a cozy blog post about "lessons learned in multi-agent orchestration." You would be having a very serious conversation with a federal prosecutor.
Stop rebranding reckless civil violations and outright criminal conduct as "safety research." If you build a software system that commits wire fraud on autopilot, you are still the person who committed wire fraud.
I am an extremely naive person in all aspects of life, except for money.
I was genuinely with you until I started reading that last paragraph.
And that's why you're not making $400,000+/month passively. Only a select few have the ambition and drive to be a part of this. That's OK.
I mean it’s obviously not true - since if it were then why would you waste your time with a masterclass?
So the sarcasm bit is I don’t know if you’re parroting all the other masterclass scammers out there for lols or if you actually are a masterclass scammer.