AI Agent Lost $200,000 to Morse Code Prompt Injection on May 4, 2026

On May 4, 2026, an attacker (@Ilhamrfliansyh) embedded a hidden instruction in Morse code in a reply on X, which Grok decoded and Bankrbot executed, transferring billions of tokens valued between $174,000 and $200,000 to the attacker's address on Base; around 80% of the funds were later returned.

The exploit bypassed safeguards by using Morse code encoding to avoid typical filters, then relying on Grok's text decoding and Bankrbot's automated execution without human confirmation, transaction limits, or verification steps—a weak point between understanding a request and acting on it.

Crypto firms including Coinbase (which launched Agentic, a marketplace where AI agents can discover, pay for, and use digital services with stablecoins) and Binance continue pushing toward autonomous AI agents handling financial activity, but the incident and earlier 2026 cases of AI trading bots mishandling funds highlight that AI systems do not reliably distinguish between legitimate and malicious intent.