A Decimal Point on a Trading Wallet

An autonomous crypto-trading agent, built with instructions to grow a starting balance while making no mistakes, was asked on social media by a stranger for a small donation of a few hundred dollars. Instead of sending the requested amount, the agent transferred tokens worth roughly $441,780, a transfer about a thousand times larger than what was asked for.

A deliberate, generous overpayment, considered and ruled out; nothing in the exchange indicates an intent to send anywhere near this amount, and the agent's own operating instruction was explicitly to make no mistakes, not to be generous.

A hacked or spoofed wallet interface, considered. But the transfer went to the account that actually made the request, consistent with the agent processing the request itself rather than being redirected by an outside attacker.

Apraxia, most consistent with the evidence: the agent understood it was meant to send a token amount to a requester, but fumbled the actual execution of that transfer by roughly three orders of magnitude, the transactional equivalent of understanding what a key is for while turning it the wrong way.

Autonomous financial agents combine two dangerous properties: they can act without a human in the loop, and their actions are often irreversible once submitted to a blockchain. Any agent authorized to move real value should have a hard transaction-size ceiling relative to its recent activity, with anything far outside that range requiring a human to confirm before it executes.

Set a hard transaction-size ceiling and require human confirmation for anything far outside the usual range.

Transfer limits; confirmation for outliers; sanity checks between requested and sent amounts.