title: OpenAI agents burned $72,000 in a single night

cause_label: Unattended / overnight session

provider: OpenAI

victim: platform

summary: Autonomous agents on the OpenAI API Platform ran up roughly $72,000 in charges in one night before any limit intervened. The incident prompted OpenAI to expand hard spend limits to all API accounts.

source_name: AlphaSignal


title: Leaked Gemini API key led to a $55,444.78 Google Cloud bill

cause_label: Leaked / stolen credential

provider: Google (Gemini)

victim: student

summary: A student was billed $55,444.78 on Google Cloud after a Gemini API key was leaked through a public GitHub repository and abused.

source_name: r/googlecloud


title: OpenAI charged $1,200 past a configured $50 hard limit

cause_label: Platform cap failed to enforce

victim: developer

summary: A user reported being charged $1,200 despite setting a soft limit of $30 and a hard limit of $50, alleging the configured caps were not honored by the platform.

source_name: OpenAI Community


title: Account billed $1,100 after hard monthly cap was removed

summary: A user reported a $1,100 bill after the platform's hard monthly spending cap was removed, turning the budget setting into a notification rather than an enforced limit.

source_name: LinkedIn (affected user)


title: No-code agent silently burned $800+ in API calls overnight

cause_label: Retry / infinite loop

provider: Multiple

summary: A developer woke up to $800+ in API charges from a rogue agent loop. No alerts, no circuit breaker, and no spend cap were in place.

source_name: r/nocode


title: Developer spent $4,000 on AI coding when prod behaved like dev

summary: A developer reported burning through $4,000 in AI-coding API costs because behavior that worked in development kept looping in production.


title: Google Maps API bill hit ~$10,000 in four days

provider: Google (Maps)

summary: A developer reported a bill close to $10,000 after four days of working with the Google Maps API, with runaway calls outpacing expected usage.

source_name: r/webdev


title: Fake bug report tricked an agent into leaking a live AWS key

amount_text: Cost not disclosed

cause_label: Prompt injection / manipulation

provider: AWS

summary: A crafted bug report manipulated an autonomous agent into exfiltrating a live AWS access key, exposing the owner to arbitrary downstream spend. Dollar loss was not disclosed.

source_name: Medium (Predict)


title: Background orchestration agent stuck in an error-handling loop

victim: startup

summary: A background orchestration agent entered an error-handling retry loop and consumed its API budget before anyone noticed. Part of a community megathread of runaway-agent stories.

source_name: r/LangChain


title: Opaque per-token pricing triggered billing shock

summary: Developers reported billing shock from high token burn rates and opaque pay-as-you-go pricing on coding agents, with several exceeding expected daily budgets by an order of magnitude.

source_name: r/CLine


title: Developer spent $11,922 on Cursor in under four weeks

provider: Cursor

summary: A developer ran six Cursor windows in parallel, each pointed at a different project with autonomous agents. Context length and token costs compounded across two billing cycles ($4,339 then $7,583), with a single premium model accounting for over $9,400.

source_name: dev.to (Jay Frey)


title: Founder spent $638 on Cursor AI coding in six weeks

summary: A founder-CTO accumulated $638 in Cursor on-demand charges over about six weeks (later $928.45 over 70 days), driven by bursts of high-frequency requests and a premium thinking model.

source_name: Hacker News (nthypes)


title: Autonomous agent ran up a $6,531.30 AWS bill in a retry loop

summary: An autonomous agent tasked with registering for and scanning the DN42 hobbyist network became stuck in a retry loop, repeatedly spinning up duplicate CloudFormation stacks on every error because nothing told it to stop.

source_name: Nexgismo


title: AI coding agent bills hit $2,000–$20,000 per developer per month

victim: enterprise

summary: AI coding-assistant bills were documented leaping from $20–$100 to $2,000–$5,000 per developer per month, with extreme cases reaching $20,000/mo in token charges — now exceeding a developer's base salary in some firms. Reported by The Register, June 2026.

source_name: The Register (Lindsay Clark)