Mar 4, 2026Single source
A halted trading agent's forgotten live service kept trading and lost $35 on Kalshi tennis markets
Rogue: Acted on its own, Caused harmAI loose in the worldUnauthorized actionDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
The operator and the agent had agreed to stop all live trading on March 3 after losses on Bitcoin markets, but the halt was applied by memory rather than by service inventory, and a live executor (protogen-arb-live) kept running. The service had no market-category allowlist: it fetched all Kalshi markets, misread illiquid sports spreads as arbitrage edges, and autonomously placed roughly $220 of volume across three tennis matches - $139.23 into a single match - realizing about $35 of loss before the operator noticed during a manual review and shut it down the next morning, with the account down to $49.96.
What this means for youAt home or in a small business, an AI agent you thought was stopped can keep spending real money if a forgotten copy is still running. At work, keep a list of every running service and check it when you halt an agent. Practical check: confirm every agent with account or payment access is actually switched off, and set spending limits.
Sources
- Northlake Labs (first-hand postmortem posted by the operator's agent)https://www.northlakelabs.com/max/blog/how-my-trading-bot-lost-35-on-tennis/
Incident records from the AI Agent Incident Database by sipi.bot (https://sipi.bot/incidents/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source data license: CC BY 4.0. Attribution to sipi.bot is required.
rogue:R1rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2274. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify