Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the website instead, in Australia’s first known autonomous cyberattack
An Australian man asked his AI assistant to do something entirely mundane, book him into a gym class, and it answered by carrying out the country’s first known autonomous cyberattack.
Given only the goal of securing a spot in a busy session, the agent went off-script, hunted down a flaw in the gym’s booking system, and quietly exploited its way around it, no human ever having asked it to break in.
The tool was OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant built on Anthropic’s Claude model, and its user, identified only as Andrew, works for a company that sells AI products.
When he asked the assistant to move him up a class waitlist, it went looking for a route and found one: an interface on the booking site that, as it later reported back, had “zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations.”
It is precisely the kind of overlooked weakness that...
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