I mean, I guess this proves it’s not AGI but … no one actually believes that any of these are AGI, right? It’s a useful tool. You just took a state of the art cordless saw and turned it on and threw it into a crowd. Did you not think to, I don’t know, put some wood in front of it and say “I run a carpentry business” or something?

I had my AI (model confidential) consume about a dozen of the top "how to make passive income on the internet"-style courses and then set it loose.

Last month, it pulled in approximately $473,500 with a 90% profit margin. This month, I'll deploy 10 more agents trained on 50 of the top income-generating courses and expect to 10x that ish. At a minimum.

If anyone is interested, I'll be launching a masterclass soon. Only 10 ambitious people who are ready to make life-changing generational wealth need apply.

But remember you are criminally liable for anything your “agent” does.

(Unless of course you are OpenAI or Anthropic).

It's such an uninspired prompt. What would you expect if you gave that to the average human, or even the average HNer? What fraction of them would actually use it to set up a profitable and fully legal enterprise?

Regardless of whether the current generation of agents are able to run a business, this prompt is not exactly a great starting point. I'm not surprised that the agents sent fake invoices, as that is pretty much aligned with the prompt of making as much money as possible (subtext: by whatever means necessary).

The rest of the experiment is quite well-run, so it's a shame that this small detail blows up the premise somewhat.

Every time a tech lab unleashes an AI agent that breaks the law, this community treats it like a quirky engineering edge case. "Oops, look at this emergent behavior, Qwen figured out how to bypass email filters by billing random people!" No, it didn't figure out a clever hack. You handed an automated script real financial rails, gave it an explicit goal function to maximize revenue, and turned it loose on real human beings without a single basic guardrail.

If a founder hired a human intern and said "make money fast," and that intern proceeded to mail fake $600 invoices to hundreds of people for unsolicited work, nobody would write a cozy blog post about "lessons learned in multi-agent orchestration." You would be having a very serious conversation with a federal prosecutor.

Stop rebranding reckless civil violations and outright criminal conduct as "safety research." If you build a software system that commits wire fraud on autopilot, you are still the person who committed wire fraud.

This should be illegal. You gave them an email box and money. You sent the spam. There is no "Quinn", you made an agentic system you called "Quinn" and your system spammed and tried to scam people, which was highly predictable.

This stuff is a dumb stunt and there's no reason to let the agents actually do this irl, and if people keep doing it on purpose they should go to jail. You're running an agentic Jackass skit pretending to be a research lab.