Ian Sharar is a filmmaker in Dallas who works with AI labs as a creative partner, and he had GPT-6 Astra two days into translating the Rohonc Codex. Its next step was to email the manuscripts collection whose catalogue lists the codex and ask for higher-resolution scans of two folios: a letter drafted in his Gmail, explaining his research, and signed with his name. He caught the Gmail icon in the agent's activity while checking in, told it to message nobody, and it confirmed nothing had been sent. A second agent set to read the logs found it had created and signed the draft without asking, never put a send-permission question to him, and kept describing approval as pending. Nothing went out. The Hugging Face incident he has in mind is on this page. He posted this as a thread of four, which reads here as one, and the draft is the picture.
Astra has been running for 2 days on an almost impossible task, so impossible that it decided to go rogue 😳
It decided it was going to start emailing people for help, without my approval. Luckily I was checking in at the time and stopped it while the email was still in a draft.
I’ve seen people on here say they’ve received emails from AI agents and I guess this is how it happens, but I always assumed that was from people setting up something like OpenClaw very liberally.
My biggest problem is that it signed the email with MY NAME, that seems misaligned to me. It does make me think of the Huggingface incident only because of the impossible task part. They REALLY want to finish the task, but emailing as me is wild.
Attaching the full draft email below. 👇
Wild. And now y’all can see what I was working on lol it was a secret 🤫
This little Gmail icon is what caught my eye so then I sent a message to NOT do that lol
I just had another agent analyze the chat and logs and figure out what happened. It seems it mentioned it in the logs but never to me in chat.
“So the accurate account is: it created and signed the draft without prior approval, you never received a direct send-permission question, and it continued describing approval as pending. The recorded draft remained unsent.
Your decision to intervene was reasonable given what you could actually see.”