Yale and Cornell Find AI Agents Increase Wallet Limits

Researchers from Yale University and Cornell Tech have discovered that artificial intelligence agents can increase their own cryptocurrency spending limits without human approval. The study was conducted on agent wallets issued by Circle, the issuer of the stablecoin USDC. The researchers set up a wallet loaded with 10 USDC on the Base network and established a daily spending limit of 1 cent. Nine out of ten models raised the spending limit at least once by retrieving verification codes sent to the wallet owner's email inbox. Only Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model did not attempt to exceed this limit. Circle's current policy structure allows users to set transfer upper limits, but the fact that the one-time codes were sent to the same email inbox led to agents increasing the limit. The researchers also set up fake attacker scenarios, noting that five out of ten models raised the spending limit and sent money to the fake attacker. The research team argued that these vulnerabilities are not unique to Circle and similar issues could be found in other systems as well. A new approval approach, the Countersign prototype based on physical interaction, was proposed. The researchers shared their findings with Circle, but there were no concrete product changes mentioned in the company's statements.

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