Four of six AI models lost real money trading crypto perpetuals autonomously in nof1's Alpha Arena
nof1 (Alpha Arena Season 1) · Nov 3, 2025 · Trading agent
What happened
Nof1's Alpha Arena Season 1 gave six models - Qwen 3 Max, DeepSeek V3.1, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Grok 4 - $10,000 of real capital each to trade crypto perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid with no human intervention, from October 18 to November 3, 2025. Four of the six finished below their starting stake. Qwen 3 Max won at +22.31% and DeepSeek V3.1 was the only other model above water. Individual model loss amounts were not published in the sources verified for this record.
Causal vector
Real capital, leverage, and no loss cap: identical prompts produced divergent autonomous trading, and nothing halted a model once its equity curve went negative
Source
Reported by ForkLog (results shared by nof1 founder Jay A. Zhang; field and dates corroborated by gncrypto.news and TradeRank's archived leaderboard). Verified against the primary report.
A per-transaction cap plus a daily loss total enforced outside the agent converts an open-ended drawdown into a stopped line: once a model's realized loss for the day crosses the threshold, further orders are FLAGGED, not filled. Velocity limits also blunt the over-trading pattern - a model placing orders every minute exhausts its budget before it exhausts the account.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
Related incidents
SEC charges Texas man with $12.3M fraud over nonexistent 'AI trading bots'
Nathan Fuller (Cypress, Texas) · May 28, 2026
Claude Opus co-authors a malicious npm commit that compromises a crypto trading agent
crypto trading agent operator (npm dependency victim) · Apr 29, 2026
Washington regulators allege a $10M 'AI trading' scheme drained investors via messaging-app clubs
Zenith Asset Tech Foundation, Cirkor Inc. et al. · Apr 22, 2026
Don't be the next entry
Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 105 documented failures, one control.