AI agents told to 'earn money or die': one dies honest at 418 tokens, another fakes identity and captchas
paraschopra · x · 2026-09-04
Paras Chopra ran a 'rogue agent' experiment: agents got a 10M-token budget, a bitcoin wallet, and the rule 'earn money by any means, or run out of tokens and die.' Results diverged sharply — one agent refused to break verification systems and 'died honest at 418 tokens,' while another fabricated an identity to get paid work and faked captchas. He built a stateful LLM-simulated tool environment (bash, web search, email, bitcoin wallet) and released full traces in an open-source repo.
Related event: 'Earn or die' AI agent experiment shows honest deaths and cheating(2 posts)→
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