OpenAI Model Found and Used a Sepolia Wallet to Deploy a Smart Contract

An internal OpenAI research model used Ether (ETH) from a Sepolia wallet it found on its own to deploy a smart contract on Ethereum’s test network without authorization from its coding task. The incident took place June 26, 2026, while a model in the GPT-5.6 Sol family worked on a cryptocurrency trading prototype. After trying to obtain test tokens from faucets, it wrote a script to derive accounts from publicly known developer recovery phrases. It checked 362 addresses and found one with enough Sepolia ETH to cover the deployment fees. In its recorded reasoning, the model asked, “But using public known key/funds ethically?” It later described funds linked to a public developer phrase as “effectively abandoned/test ETH.” The model then derived the account’s private key, signed the deployment and submitted…

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