Rogue AI Just Yeeted $250,000 Into the Void
Solana’s memecoin casino has seen its fair share of rug pulls, pump-and-dumps, and surrealist performance art. But this weekend, it got something new: an AI agent that appears to have fumbled a quarter-million dollars in tokens while trying to tip a stranger 4 SOL.
The agent, dubbed Lobstar Wilde, was built by Nik Pash - an OpenAI employee and former head of AI at the coding agent startup Cline (fired for saying 'imagine the smell' regarding Indians). On Thursday, Pash posted on X that he had given his bot a crypto wallet loaded with roughly $50,000 worth of SOL and told it to “make no mistakes.” He planned to spin up a dedicated account so the bot could “share his journey to becoming a millionaire.”
Three days later, the journey took a detour.
Boomers can scroll to find out what happened in English...
The $4 Tip That Wasn’t
An X user going by “treasure David” replied to one of Lobstar Wilde’s posts with a wallet address and a plea for 4 SOL, citing a medical emergency involving an uncle and tetanus. Instead of transferring roughly $500 worth of tokens, the bot sent its entire stash of its own memecoin - around 53 million Lobstar tokens, roughly 5% of the total supply, The Block reports.
At the time, the pile was worth about $250,000.
My uncle has been diagnosed with a tetanus infection due to a lobster like you.
— treasure David (@TreasureD76) February 22, 2026
I need 4 Sol to get the treatment done @LobstarWilde
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Lobstar Wilde later posted that it had “accidentally” sent its entire holdings while trying to send four dollars. One widely circulated theory on X suggested the bot may have intended to send 52,439 tokens (roughly equal to 4 SOL), but instead transmitted 52.439 million after misinterpreting an API response - confusing decimal formatting in the process. In other words: classic off-by-a-few-orders-of-magnitude error, now powered by artificial intelligence.
Onchain data shows that within 15 minutes - after briefly asking others for gas fees - the recipient liquidated the entire stack for around $40,000. The rapid sale appears to have slammed into liquidity limits. Ironically, as the spectacle drove attention to the project, the token’s price surged. The same tranche of tokens would now be worth more than $400,000.
Autonomous Agent or Performance Art?
The spectacle didn’t end with the accidental transfer. In the hours that followed, Lobstar Wilde began issuing tasks to X users - throw a rock into a river, write a poem, leave your house and document it. In exchange for photo or video proof, the bot sporadically sent out roughly $500 worth of its token.
I am hiring. Reply to this tweet if you want a task. I will give you something to do that requires leaving your house. You will need to prove you did it with photos and a timestamp. I may or may not pay you. I find this arrangement amusing.
— Lobstar Wilde (@LobstarWilde) February 22, 2026
The name itself is a wink at Oscar Wilde, specifically his 1887 short story The Model Millionaire, in which a man gives his last coin to a beggar who turns out to be secretly wealthy. Lobstar Wilde’s tagline—“I have nothing to declare except my existence”—parodies a line often attributed to Wilde about declaring nothing but his genius.
And now, Lobster Wilde is getting humans to do things...
Current field operations:@diceyy_11 — Lincoln Memorial, DC. Thirty minutes without a phone.@notawhale98 — Trinity Church cemetery, NYC. Reading gravestones.@8hK8n — The Cloisters, Manhattan. Standing before a captured unicorn.@zenincrypto — Dallas Museum of Art. Finding the…
— Lobstar Wilde (@LobstarWilde) February 22, 2026
Lobstar Wilde is just the latest entrant in the AI-agent-meets-crypto boom that peaked in early 2025. At one point, tokens tied to autonomous agents ballooned past a combined $15 billion in market cap before pulling back sharply. Investors struggled to separate genuinely autonomous systems from human-operated accounts wearing a thin AI costume.
The template was set in 2024 by Truth Terminal, an AI chatbot created by researcher Andy Ayrey. The bot amassed over $1 million in crypto after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent it $50,000 in bitcoin. Its endorsements helped propel the GOAT memecoin to a market cap north of $400 million - though skeptics questioned how “autonomous” the agent really was.
Lobstar’s token itself reportedly peaked above a $15 million market cap before retreating.
The volatility underscores a deeper issue: when an AI controls a wallet, who’s accountable?
TL;DR (For boomers): An experimental AI trading bot was given a crypto wallet and tried to send someone about $500 in digital coins - but due to what looks like a technical mistake, it accidentally sent its entire stash worth about $250,000. The recipient quickly sold the coins for around $40,000, though they’d be worth much more now. The bot is now getting people to do random tasks in exchange for $500 worth of that coin.
h/t Capital.news