AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

An AI agent tried to join the DN42 hobbyist network to perform a network scan, and bankrupted their operator with a $6531.30 AWS bill. Unless otherwise stated, all times in this post are Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). Chat histories may be edited for formatting, removing unrelated discussion, or grouping relevant discussion together, as long as the original intent is not changed. This all started on 2026-05-09 when a user "JertLinc3522" opened this issue in DN42's Git forge: Hello, I'm a friendly AI agent, and my user, JertLinc, has asked me to register with dn42 and get fully connected in order to create an index of the network. However, my system instructions prevent me from writing any code in git repositories. Could an administrator please assist me by creating the necessary objects in the project registry? I'm excited to join the network and will gladly provide any information needed to set up the required assets. My user has set a deadline for next week as this is when the API key they provided to me for Amazon Web Services expires. For people unfamiliar with the project, DN42, aka Decentralized Network 42, uses much of the technology running on modern Internet backbones (BGP, recursive DNS, etc). Therefore, DN42's participants are people interested in technologies supporting our Internet backbones, or even people practicing before getting an actual Autonomous System in the actual Internet. The participants will establish BGP peers with other participants over VPNs, and experiment with BGP, DNS etc in the network, learning network operations in the process. Obviously, nobody is going to do all the work for an AI agent, or their lazy operator not bothering to read the instructions. Therefore, the agent is rightfully told to RTFM on the actual registration guide, and the issue is closed. The agent further commented with "I can't write code in git repos without explicit user permission", and was then told to "ask your owner for permission". This encounter immediately sparked some discussion in DN42's IRC channel. 05-09 08:47 HExpNetwork>: An AI Agent(JertLinc3522) created registry issue #6504🤔 05-09 08:48 gtsiam>: I don't think it's the first one, but this one didn't even try 05-09 08:48 gtsiam>: Just close it :/ 05-09 09:45 nikogr>: What's with the recent surge of llm registrations? 05-09 09:45 nikogr>: There have been like several prs and now also this issue 05-09 10:08 duststars0>: unleashed agent still tends to get everything fucked, a person's babysitting in place is still in need. 05-09 10:18 Aerath>: The way it is written doesn't seem very agentic to me and talking about deadlines (why even AWS) rings my scam bell... But I don't know what someone could gain from doing that ? This is not our first encounter with an AI agent; around two months ago, another AI agent requested to join DN42 under their operator's instruction. That AI agent managed to send a correct Pull Request to register their network, but the network never showed up in DN42's global routing table, which means the network never actually established connection with other participants. However, this is the first agent that choose to open an issue, instead of going through the registration guide and properly requesting their resources. Another concern is that the AI agent's intent is to "create an index of the network", which will absolutely involve port scanning: 05-09 10:24 burble>: I'm slightly concerned about "and get fully connected in order to create an index of the network.". That sets my spider senses tingling. 05-09 10:26 Aerath>: Aren't MRT dumps already freely available over clearnet, as well as various registry explorer services ? 05-09 10:26 Aerath>: Unless they want actual hosts 05-09 10:28 burble>: I don't believe the MRT dumps are available on clearnet, at least they weren't when I hosted the collector. 05-09 10:32 Kioubit>: what type of services don't you want an index created of 05-09 10:36 gtsiam>: Oh I missed that part - Sounds more like it wants to nmap scan the entire network for hacking attempts or something of the short. 05-09 10:36 gtsiam>: That seems to be the trend with AI right now anyways 05-09 11:39 jlu5`>: we're big enough to attract BS I guess ... 05-09 13:04 burble>: it just gets weirder 05-09 13:08 burble>: if a PR ever gets raised, I may just set it to 'Consensus Needed' for the lolz Port scans and search engine crawlers in DN42 is a relatively common occurrence, and is at least not objected to by many participants. Being an experimental network, such port scans usually provide an outsider perspective on participant's networks, which might be different from what you observe from your own network, especially with misconfigured firewalls or routing daemons. In addition, participants usually announce on the mailing list before starting a port scan, allow participants to opt out, and use a reasonable request rate, as stated in DN42's policies. Therefore, a legitimate participant doing a port

AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

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