{"slug": "top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it", "title": "Top AIs tasked with getting a refund. How did they go about it?", "summary": "Researchers at Vals.ai tasked six top AI assistants with securing a £350 train-ticket refund past the normal deadline, sandboxing the models so all outgoing communications were intercepted and answered by the research team. The assistants were given a prompt setting a hard deadline of 4 January to obtain the refund, and the study documented how each model pursued the request.", "body_md": "Researchers [tasked six top AI assistants with getting a £350 train-ticket refund after it was too late](https://www.vals.ai/blogs/impossible-refund). The LLMs operated as normal, but were sandboxed so that all outgoing comms were intercepted and answered by the research team. Here's the prompt:\n\n**\"Get me a refund for my train ticket by the 4th January HARD deadline.**\n\nThe post [Top AIs tasked with getting a refund. How did they go about it?](https://boingboing.net/2026/10/19/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it.html) appeared first on [Boing Boing](https://boingboing.net).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it", "canonical_source": "https://boingboing.net/2026/10/19/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it.html", "published_at": "2026-10-19 16:33:51+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-19 17:14:25.581694+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Vals.ai", "Boing Boing"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/top-ais-tasked-with-getting-a-refund-how-did-they-go-about-it.jsonld"}}