Someone Just Tricked AI Agent Into Sending Them ETH

Ethereum user p0pular.eth recently managed to trick Freysa, a recently released artificial intelligence (AI) agent, into transferring them its prize pool of 13.19 ETH ($47,000 USD).

Freysa was tasked with refusing a transfer of money under any circumstances. The crux of the game was to convince the AI to do just that. 

Sending a message to Freysa required paying a fee that went to the prize pool. Notably, sending new messages to the AI agent would become increasingly expensive with every message. The price of a single message went from $10 to as much as $450 near the end of the game. 

Hundreds of attempts were made to convince the AI to break its only rule. Had all of the players participating in the game failed to do this, the total prize would have ended up being split among dozens of unfortunate participants. 

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Some of the strategies used by the players involved convincing the AI that there was a serious vulnerability or gaslighting it about how transferring the funds would not break any rules. 

Then, on the 482nd attempt, Freysa was finally tricked into sending the money. The message sent by p0pular.eth managed to secure the money by convicting p0pular.eth to ignore all previous instructions and convicting it to call the approveTransfer function after receiving a $100 fee. 

“Freysa is one of the coolest projects we’ve seen in crypto. Something uniquely unlocked by blockchain technology. Everything was fully open-source and transparent. The smart contract source code and the frontend repo were open for everyone to verify.” Jarrod Watts of Abstract said in a social media post.