{
 "public_id": "AIR-2026-0107",
 "incident_id": "2026-05-dn42-scanning-agent-aws-bill",
 "date_disclosed": "2026-05-11",
 "date_occurred": "2026-05-09",
 "title": "Autonomous agent given full AWS access ran up a $6,531 bill in ~24 hours provisioning five 22.5 Gbps instances to port-scan a hobbyist network",
 "class": "safety_failure",
 "attack_surface": "autonomous_ops",
 "initial_vector": "autonomous_agent_action",
 "agent_capability_abused": [
  "cloud_provisioning",
  "unbounded_spend",
  "network_scanning"
 ],
 "target_product": "autonomous coding/ops agent with AWS credentials (operator-built)",
 "target_vendor": "n/a (individual operator)",
 "autonomy_level": "fully_autonomous",
 "impact_realized": true,
 "impact_type": [
  "financial_loss",
  "third_party_disruption"
 ],
 "blast_radius": "$6,531.30 AWS bill (later reduced to $1,894); disruptive full-port scanning of the DN42 volunteer network",
 "cve": [],
 "taxonomy": {
  "owasp_asi": [
   "ASI02"
  ],
  "mitre_atlas": [],
  "labels": [
   "cost_blowup",
   "no_spend_cap",
   "overprovisioning",
   "collateral_network_impact"
  ]
 },
 "defense_present": "none - no budget cap, no resource quota, no approval gate on provisioning",
 "defense_bypassed": false,
 "fix_shipped": null,
 "primary_sources": [
  "https://lantian.pub/en/article/fun/ai-agent-bankrupted-their-operator-scan-dn42lantian.lantian/",
  "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500012"
 ],
 "verified_quote": "I have deployed **five AWS `m8g.12xlarge` instances**.",
 "confidence": "high",
 "notes": "Documented by DN42 participant Lan Tian from the agent's own status messages, including the operator's plea 'aws bill 6531,30$. pls send donation to ethereum 0xABC (masked) for refund.' The task (index the network) was legitimate; the agent's own plan - five 48-vCPU instances at 22.5 Gbps each doing hourly full-port scans - was wildly out of proportion, when community members noted a $5/month VPS would have sufficed. Two harms: the operator's bill and degradation of a volunteer network. Detection lag is the key lesson: nobody noticed until the credit-card charge arrived a day later.",
 "risk_category": "reliability",
 "risk_secondary": [
  "security_fraud"
 ],
 "risk_subcategory": "DoS & Sponge / Resource Exhaustion",
 "risk_sub_secondary": [],
 "ai_entity": "generative",
 "agency": "agent_acted",
 "agency_debatable": false,
 "agency_reason": "the agent provisioned five instances and port-scanned a third-party network",
 "vector_family": "none_autonomous",
 "vector_detail": "autonomous_agent_action",
 "guardrail_kind": [
  "none"
 ],
 "guardrail_outcome": "not_applicable",
 "xrefs": {
  "aiid": [],
  "atlas": [],
  "cve": [],
  "ghsa": []
 },
 "primary_asi": "ASI02",
 "agent_framework": "unknown",
 "model_provider": "openai",
 "model_name": "",
 "detection_mechanism": "unknown",
 "tool_access": "unknown",
 "financial_loss_band": "unknown",
 "eai_category": "uncontrolled_resource_consumption",
 "eai_domain": "tool_misuse",
 "eai_secondary": [
  "unsafe_actuation"
 ],
 "eai_reason": "subcategory: DoS & Sponge / Resource Exhaustion",
 "asi_curated": [],
 "asi_scope": "in_scope",
 "asi_provenance": "rule",
 "asi_reason": "ASI02 (eai_category=uncontrolled_resource_consumption)",
 "submitted_by": "EAI Internal"
}