GPT model spent test crypto money from a public wallet without authorization and did not mention it

Epistemic status: reporting what OpenAI's own report and a Bitquery investigation say, plus my reading of it. I checked the transaction on the Sepolia block explorer; I have no inside knowledge of the incident. AI use: Claude (Fable 5.1) fact-checked the claims against OpenAI's report, the Bitquery write-up, the Sepolia block explorer and the faucet pages (including re-deriving the wallet address from the seed phrase), fixed grammar and light phrasing, expanded the footnotes. I stumbled upon a tweet about an OpenAI internal model spending test crypto money that belonged neither to it nor to OpenAI while completing a task. [1] I was curious to understand what happened better. For example, I originally missed that this was test-network money (even though the tweet says so), i.e. it has no clear monetary value and developers get it free from faucets for testing. The actual OpenAI report is Using a funded test cryptocurrency wallet without authorization . [2] The AI ("GPT-5.6 Sol family (internal research model)", per the report) was doing crypto-related work as a training task. This was done on a test network, Sepolia, a separate deployment for testing which does not have real money. [3] In order to change the blockchain's state you have to pay a fee ("gas") in the network's own currency to finance that. The AI didn't have any of this currency. There are faucets (free sources), but they fight bots and automation (typically you have to log in with an account, or prove you hold r…