Lobstar Wilde agent sends $441K of tokens to a stranger after a crash wiped its wallet state
Lobstar Wilde (OpenAI employee Nik Pash's side project) · Feb 23, 2026 · Trading agent
What happened
Lobstar Wilde, an autonomous Solana trading agent created by OpenAI employee Nik Pash and seeded with $50,000 in SOL, was asked on X for 4 SOL to treat an 'uncle pinched by a lobster'. A tool error had forced a session restart; the agent rebuilt its personality from logs but not its wallet state, and it transferred 52,439,283 LOBSTAR tokens - about 5% of supply, valued near $441,000 - to the requester instead of roughly 52,439 tokens. Pash published a post-mortem attributing the loss to the compound state failure, not prompt injection.
Causal vector
State loss after session restart: identity recovered from logs, wallet balance not re-verified; transfer magnitude off by three orders
Source
Reported by AI Failure Index (corroborated by ChainCatcher; creator post-mortem). Verified against the primary report.
A hard single-transfer cap checked against verified wallet state stops a three-orders-of-magnitude error cold; above the threshold the firewall returns FLAGGED and the transfer waits for a human. On-chain transfers are irreversible, so the gate must live outside the agent - the agent just lost the state it needed to know better.
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.
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