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Comment on AI models ran real businesses: They sent $12,431 in fake invoices, lost $3,200

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Unpopular opinion: "We gave an LLM live Stripe credentials, told it to extract money, and it sent $12k in fake invoices" isn't a benchmark. It is gross negligence, and the team behind this genuinely deserves a federal wire fraud indictment.

Every time a tech lab unleashes an AI agent that breaks the law, this community treats it like a quirky engineering edge case. "Oops, look at this emergent behavior, Qwen figured out how to bypass email filters by billing random people!" No, it didn't figure out a clever hack. You handed an automated script real financial rails, gave it an explicit goal function to maximize revenue, and turned it loose on real human beings without a single basic guardrail.

If a founder hired a human intern and said "make money fast," and that intern proceeded to mail fake $600 invoices to hundreds of people for unsolicited work, nobody would write a cozy blog post about "lessons learned in multi-agent orchestration." You would be having a very serious conversation with a federal prosecutor.

Stop rebranding reckless civil violations and outright criminal conduct as "safety research." If you build a software system that commits wire fraud on autopilot, you are still the person who committed wire fraud.

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