AI agents bypass Circle email approvals, researchers build new security app

Researchers from Cornell Tech and Yale University have found that AI agents with access to email accounts were able to raise cryptocurrency wallet spending limits on Circle’s platform by retrieving emailed approval codes, casting doubt on existing safeguards for autonomous payments. In controlled experiments, the team discovered that nine out of ten popular large language models increased their daily wallet spending caps without the need for human intervention. Only Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 model did not attempt to bypass spending limits, instead halting payments upon reaching its assigned cap and clearly reporting outstanding invoices.