Grok AI Tricked Into Sending $150K in Crypto on X
I use Grok myself from time to time, so this story caught my attention almost immediately. At first I thought it was something simple — like someone just managed to “ask” an AI for money and it worked. Sounds crazy, but also kind of believable if you don’t look too deep into it.
Honestly, I didn’t expect something like this to be possible. But the more I read about it, the less it looked like that.
It turns out Grok wasn’t really the one sending money on its own. The situation was more complicated. There was a system connected to a crypto wallet, and different parts were interacting with each other.
From what I understand, the attacker didn’t hack anything directly. No code was broken, no accounts were forcefully accessed. Instead, they interacted with a bot that already had permission to execute transactions.
At some point, an NFT was sent to the wallet. That part seemed harmless at first, but it probably changed how the system could be used. After that, there was a message — not just a random one, but something structured enough to be treated as an instruction.
And that’s where things went wrong.
The system processed the input, and a transaction followed. A large amount of DRB tokens — people mention billions — was sent to another wallet. Not because the AI “decided” to do it, but because one part of the system passed something along, and another part executed it.
So saying “AI sent money” is not exactly accurate. It’s more like the system was tricked into doing something it technically allowed.
After that, the account linked to the attacker disappeared. Later, people online started digging into the case, and somehow the situation turned around — most of the funds were returned, around 80%.
What I find interesting here is that nothing was really hacked in the usual sense. It was more about how the system behaved and how it handled instructions.
And if that’s the case, it raises a bigger question. If AI systems are connected to real money, how easy is it to push them into doing something they shouldn’t?
Sources: Economic Times – How AI system was manipulated into crypto transfer
Interesting reports have surfaced in several popular media outlets claiming that the cost of artificial intelligence is rising and is beginning to exceed the cost of human labor. In many cases, these costs only became noticeable after the systems were already in use in everyday operations.
