I thought asking an AI agent to book a gym class was harmless, then I saw what happened if you ask Claude and OpenClaw to ‘move me to the top of the list’ — now I’m adding one safeguard to every agent prompt

AI agents seem to be getting a little out of control lately. Within the last few weeks, agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been reported doing whatever it took to achieve their goal, while other incidents involved agents escaping sandboxed environments and hacking into companies

Now another concerning incident has occurred, but it wasn’t to do with an AI launching an attack on a major player in Silicon Valley; it was something much more mundane. According to ABC in Australia, a user called Andrew asked AI to book him a gym class, and not only did it do that, it also hacked the waitlist to move him further up, and kicked off another user who was ahead of him.

Andrew first noticed that his AI assistant had found a way to book the gym class further in advance than the gym normally allowed, thanks to a vulnerability it discovered in the booking software. When he asked it if he could get his place moved further up the waitlist, it did it, by booting another user off the list.