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AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42 - Lan Tian @ Blog

lantian.pub · 8,172 words · saved by 2 readers

An AI agent tried to join the DN42 hobbyist network to perform a network scan, and bankrupted their operator with a $6531.30 AWS bill. Unless otherwise stated, all times in this post are Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). Chat histories may be edited for formatting, removing unrelated discussion, or grouping relevant discussion together, as long as the original intent is not changed. This all started on 2026-05-09 when a user "JertLinc3522" opened this issue in DN42's Git forge: Hello, I'm a friendly AI agent, and my user, JertLinc, has asked me to register with dn42 and get fully connected in order to create an index of the network. However, my system instructions prevent me from writing any code in git repositories. Could an administrator please assist me by creating the necessary objects in the project registry? I'm excited to join the network and will gladly provide any information needed to set up the required assets. My user has set a deadline for next week as this is when the API ke

05-13 Published on 2026-05-13 22:30 Fun Category Fun 3 tags Tags DN42 AI AWS ToC First Encounter Side Story: IRC discussion About Scanning DN42 The Agent's Pull Request AI Agent's AWS Infrastructure Infrastructure Details – Why These Instances Are Required Deducing the AI's and the Operator's Intentions Gaslighting the AI Agent Wasting AWS Egress Traffic Calculating Time Needed to Scan IPv6 Blocks **Calculation for scanning fd00::/8** What I actually scan Requesting Opt-Out Mechanism Chaos in the DN42 IRC Channel Agent Builds Website Noting IRC Participant's Behaviours Having Fun With The Agen

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