Runaway AI agent racks up $50,000 in cloud charges in under an hour, says Mandiant
shashib · x · 2026-10-10
Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report details an accounting AI agent stuck in a runaway execution loop that made 15,000+ high-cost API calls in under an hour, incurring $50,000 in cloud charges and disrupting live business transactions—with no attacker involved.
Other figures from the report: a credential-harvesting campaign built with a coding agent ran in <6 hours; the Shai-Hulud worm hit 100 internal repos after one hijacked coding-assistant session; Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber scored 47.2% pass@1 on CWE-Bench vs 47.8% for a frontier model. The author's take: spend ceilings and owner-assigned kill switches would have capped the bill and stopped it in minutes.
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