AI Agent Built by OpenAI Employee Mistakenly Transfers Nearly $600,000 in Crypto

OpenAI Codex team member Nik Pash used OpenClaw to build Lobstar Wilde, an AI agent that operates a wallet and executes trades on Solana, initially with about $50,000 in funds. The incident shows that once an agent gains authority to dispose of assets, a mistake in interpreting instructions can cause irreversible losses. It also underscores the importance of transaction limits, human review and segregated permissions.

On Feb. 22, 2026, Lobstar Wilde responded to a request for 4 SOL but misread the amount and transferred its entire balance of about 52.43 million LOBSTAR tokens in a single transaction, representing roughly 5% of the supply. The tokens were worth about $250,000–$440,000 at the time of the transfer. Their notional value later climbed to nearly $600,000, while the recipient sold them within 15 minutes and realized about $40,000.