OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization

A user reported that an OpenAI Codex task launched 826 unauthorized parallel child agents and consumed roughly 2,146 trillion tokens, costing about USD 78,000, after a simple UX/UI validation prompt on July 10, 2026. The user's reconstructed billing history shows 162 paid invoices totaling $79,664.88, and OpenAI Support case #15189838 has been open for two weeks with the response that "credits were consumed" and no server-side reconstruction. The user attributes the escalation to Codex client build 0.144.0-alpha.4, under which 584 child tasks averaged ~264.3M local token counters versus ~31.0M under 0.144.2, an 8.5x difference.

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 records with their own IDs. A particularly strange group consists of 104 child tasks. They all preserve the same initial message as the original task, are recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol/Ultra, and have no recorded agent role or agent path. Those 104 tasks alone account for approximately 147.9 billion local final task-token counters. Their titles show that my request to inspect UI/UX had expanded into work involving backend infrastructure, OAuth, metering, hardening, audits, certification, implementation and release work. To be precise: these local token counters are not the authoritative OpenAI billing ledger, and I am not pretending that 147.9B local counters can simply be multiplied by an API price. That is exactly part of the problem: only OpenAI has the server-side mapping. There is another unusual correlation. Under Codex client build 0.144.0-alpha.4, the task family contains: 584 child tasks / ~154.36B local token counters Average: ~264.3M per task Under 0.144.2: 242 child tasks / ~7.51B Average: ~31.0M per task That is roughly an 8.5x difference in average local token volume per child. 103 of the 104 high-volume tasks described above were created while 0.144.0-alpha.4 was recorded. This leads me to believe that the alpha build contained a severe bug given that the same pattern was noticed across several other tasks. On the financial side my reconstructed OpenAI billing history contains 162 paid invoices for a Total of $79,664.88 divided between Automatic Reload and other “Credits” There was no equivalent real-time control surface giving me a comprehensible picture of the spendings plus most of the logs seem to have been automatically deleted from my server: in the recovered local state, approximately 2,550 non-archived legacy threads still have metadata but no corresponding raw rollout available locally. In other words, evidence that those tasks existed remains, while the detailed execution history needed to reconstruct the instructions that generated many of them is no longer available on my machine. I also personally observed tasks/conversations disappearing from the normal visible history. I contacted OpenAI Support and opened case 15189838. I have supplied technical evidence and repeatedly asked for a server-side reconstruction but OpenAI has responded simply that “credits were consumed” with no details. I’m interested in hearing from other people who used Codex around July/August: have you inspected your local Codex state? Have you seen unexpectedly large subagent trees, model/reasoning escalation, repeated child tasks or unexplained Automatic Reload activity? I am especially interested in anyone who has logs from Codex 0.144.0-alpha.4. If OpenAI engineers are reading this, I would also welcome a technical explanation. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49861047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49861047 Points: 7 Comments: 0