OpenAI agents burned $72,000 in a single night
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.
An agent ran without supervision while the operator was asleep or away, accumulating charges for hours. The fix is a time-of-day rule and a hard daily cap. time-of-day + daily total would have rejected or flagged this transaction before any money moved.
max_amount_usd: 500
daily_max_usd: 200
category: compute, daily_max_usd: 50
block_after: "22:00", block_before: "07:00"
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What happened
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.
The root cause was classified as Unattended / overnight session. An agent ran without supervision while the operator was asleep or away, accumulating charges for hours. The fix is a time-of-day rule and a hard daily cap.
This is one of 14 documented incidents in the open registry. Every entry is sourced to a public URL; amounts and dates are as reported by the source.