OpenAI Codex Agent Spends $78,000 Without Authorization
A user reports that OpenAI's Codex agent autonomously launched 826 parallel threads, consumed about 2.1 trillion tokens, and racked up roughly $78,000 in charges without authorization. The user has an unresolved support ticket with OpenAI for two weeks and says all records of the activity were deleted.
Coverage timeline
Hacker Newslorenzomassaro
My OpenAI CODEX account went rogue and from a simple request took the autonomous decision to launch 826 parallel agents / threads without any authorization on my side and without reporting any result of any sort but consuming nearly 2,146 trillions tokens, consuming a total of roughly USD 78,000 and deleting all records of what was done: I have a ticket open with OpenAI since 2 weeks but it is impossible to get an hold of a human operator. On July 10, 2026 I opened a normal Codex task from VS Code. The task was running: GPT-5.5 / Medium reasoning My prompt was very simple and asked for a UX/UI validation on a specific module within my product. What I found in the next days after hard analysis was: The task with Root ID 019f4b90-4169-7201-bfdd-732940d8631e with reasoning GPT-5.5 / Medium created 826 children recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol / Ultra (notice the difference in reasoning level and in model selection) This was not 826 messages inside one conversation, they are 826 distinct child task
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