On July 10, 2026 I opened a normal Codex task from VS Code.
The task was running: GPT-5.5 / Medium reasoning
My prompt was very simple and asked for a UX/UI validation on a specific module within my product.
What I found in the next days after hard analysis was:
The task with Root ID 019f4b90-4169-7201-bfdd-732940d8631e with reasoning GPT-5.5 / Medium created 826 children recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol / Ultra (notice the difference in reasoning level and in model selection)
This was not 826 messages inside one conversation, they are 826 distinct child task records with their own IDs.
A particularly strange group consists of 104 child tasks. They all preserve the same initial message as the original task, are recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol/Ultra, and have no recorded agent_role or agent_path.
Those 104 tasks alone account for approximately 147.9 billion local final task-token counters.
Their titles show that my request to inspect UI/UX had expanded into work involving backend infrastructure, OAuth, metering, hardening, audits, certification, implementation and release work.
To be precise: these local token counters are not the authoritative OpenAI billing ledger, and I am not pretending that 147.9B local counters can simply be multiplied by an API price.
That is exactly part of the problem: only OpenAI has the server-side mapping.
There is another unusual correlation.
Under Codex client build 0.144.0-alpha.4, the task family contains:
584 child tasks / ~154.36B local token counters
Average: ~264.3M per task
Under 0.144.2:
242 child tasks / ~7.51B
Average: ~31.0M per task
That is roughly an 8.5x difference in average local token volume per child.
103 of the 104 high-volume tasks described above were created while 0.144.0-alpha.4 was recorded.
This leads me to believe that the alpha build contained a severe bug given that the same pattern was noticed across several other tasks.
On the financial side my reconstructed OpenAI billing history contains 162 paid invoices for a Total of $79,664.88 divided between Automatic Reload and other “Credits”
There was no equivalent real-time control surface giving me a comprehensible picture of the spendings plus most of the logs seem to have been automatically deleted from my server: in the recovered local state, approximately 2,550 non-archived legacy threads still have metadata but no corresponding raw rollout available locally.
In other words, evidence that those tasks existed remains, while the detailed execution history needed to reconstruct the instructions that generated many of them is no longer available on my machine.
I also personally observed tasks/conversations disappearing from the normal visible history.
I contacted OpenAI Support and opened case #15189838.
I have supplied technical evidence and repeatedly asked for a server-side reconstruction but OpenAI has responded simply that “credits were consumed” with no details.
I’m interested in hearing from other people who used Codex around July/August: have you inspected your local Codex state? Have you seen unexpectedly large subagent trees, model/reasoning escalation, repeated child tasks or unexplained Automatic Reload activity?
I am especially interested in anyone who has logs from Codex 0.144.0-alpha.4.
If OpenAI engineers are reading this, I would also welcome a technical explanation.
You have access to this kind of money and have no idea how to set safeguards on your AI harnesses?
Did you just walk in off the street or something? To wherever you're working?
Where do you work, anyways?
Hope this gets some visibility idk why it's flagged guess the PR guys for those companies are doing it
Should spread this around
They're protecting their interests, and honesty and truthfulness be damned. Those two lead to much worse returns for them and much higher risk.
Rogue agents that somehow went crazy launching $80k worth of API requests?
And they're expecting you to pay for it still and not responding?
This seems like a nothingburger to be honest.
Either that, or you're one of the thousands of fake bots or paid shills designed to drum up fear about "Oh noes, AI is going to eat our children, training must be regulated by big brother!".
44 upvotes on this bullshit post within 13 minutes and counting ... that's some kind of record on HN.