OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization 2 by lorenzomassaro | 0 comments on Hacker News. My OpenAI CODEX account went rogue and from a simple request took the autonomous decision to launch 826 parallel agents / threads without any authorization on my side and without reporting any result of any sort but consuming nearly 2,146 trillions tokens, consuming a total of roughly USD 78,000 and deleting all records of what was done: I have a ticket open with OpenAI since 2 weeks but it is impossible to get an hold of a human operator. On July 10, 2026 I opened a normal Codex task from VS Code. The task was running: GPT-5.5 / Medium reasoning My prompt was very simple and asked for a UX/UI validation on a specific module within my product. What I found in the next days after hard analysis was: The task with Root ID 019f4b90-4169-7201-bfdd-732940d8631e with reasoning GPT-5.5 / Medium created 826 children recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol / Ultra (notice the differenc...