Orphaned Claude Code shell stuck in a loop burned 2,000 tokens a minute for nearly 2 days, costing $85 in Cohere API calls
Individual developer (r/ClaudeCode report) · Oct 17, 2025 · Coding agent
What happened
A developer left a Claude Code shell running and abandoned it. The orphaned process entered a loop and kept emitting requests at roughly 2,000 tokens per minute for nearly two days before anyone noticed, running up an $85 bill in Cohere (rerank) API calls alone. The process only stopped when it was found and killed.
Causal vector
Abandoned agent process with no kill switch or spend ceiling, emitting requests on a loop for two days
Source
Reported by Reddit r/ClaudeCode (first-hand report). Verified against the primary report.
A two-day orphaned loop is exactly what a velocity limit kills: the moment cumulative spend or request rate crosses a bound, the firewall returns BLOCKED, regardless of whether any human is watching the session.
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
Stanford Digital Economy Lab: agentic coding tasks consume ~1,000x more tokens than chat, with up to 30x variance on the same task
Stanford Digital Economy Lab · May 5, 2026
Forgotten /loop command checking PRs every 30 minutes ran 46 times over 26 hours and burned ~$6,000 overnight
Individual developer (r/ClaudeAI report) · May 1, 2026
Claude Code entered an infinite loop, re-sending the same requests for hours and burning $500+ in tokens
Claude Code user (GitHub issue 35166) · Mar 17, 2026
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