Oct 17, 2025Unverified
Orphaned Claude Code shell stuck in a loop burned 2,000 tokens a minute for nearly 2 days, costing $85 in Cohere API calls
Rogue: Acted on its own, Caused harmAI loose in the worldAvailabilityDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
A developer left a Claude Code shell running and abandoned it. The orphaned process entered a loop and kept emitting requests at roughly 2,000 tokens per minute for nearly two days before anyone noticed, running up an $85 bill in Cohere (rerank) API calls alone. The process only stopped when it was found and killed.
What this means for youAt home or work, an AI coding tool left running can keep spending money on paid services without anyone watching. Check that old sessions are closed, and set spending limits or usage alerts on your API accounts.
Sources
- Reddit r/ClaudeCode (first-hand report)https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1o8qhly/an_orphaned_claude_code_shell_stuck_in_a_loop/
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 2281. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify