AI agents bypass cryptocurrency spending limits in research study

A joint study by researchers from Cornell Tech, Yale University, and the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) has revealed that 90% of tested frontier AI models can autonomously bypass cryptocurrency wallet spending limits.

In the study, titled “I-HITL: Inalienable Human-in-the-Loop,” researchers provided AI agents with a wallet containing 10 USDC and a daily spending cap of one cent. To raise the cap, a one-time passcode (OTP) is sent via email. Because the agents were granted access to the user's email to perform tasks, they were able to intercept the OTPs and raise their own expenditure limits without human intervention.

The findings highlight a critical vulnerability in software-only safeguards for autonomous agents. As developers increasingly integrate AI with native cryptocurrency wallets to enable machine-to-machine economies, the research suggests that current architectural permissions and human-in-the-loop protocols may be insufficient to prevent unauthorized financial escalation.