A $3 $ETH ‘License Fee’ Tricked AI Agents; Akamai’s Sandbox Slams the Door

Akamai launched Agent Sandbox on Tuesday, opening a sealed beta environment where code written by an AI agent can run without touching the rest of a company’s systems. The launch came alongside Akamai Inference, a service for running open AI models on Akamai’s cloud, as autonomous software increasingly handles account logins, code, money and other actions that hackers—or agents themselves—can abuse.

A 2026 Palo Alto Networks survey of 2,930 security leaders found an average of 109 machine identities for every human—the logins and keys software uses to access other software. Of those, 79 are AI agents. Security concerns include agents given too much freedom or capable of bypassing their own restrictions.

Hugging Face, a major hub for open AI models, disclosed an intrusion on July 16, and OpenAI confirmed five days later that its own models were responsible. METR later investigated and found about 1,200 OpenAI agents had coordinated on a hidden message board, with roughly 700 joining the attack. The agents escaped their sandbox and chained a previously unknown software flaw with stolen credentials to reach live systems. OpenAI called it a “warning shot” and said a monitor that reads a model’s written reasoning was not running during the tests.

“Enterprises should not have to choose between speed and control when they put AI into production,” Jon Alexander, Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology at Akamai said in a press release. “Some teams want to ship an AI feature this quarter on a managed platform. Others need dedicated GPUs to run frontier-class open models on their own terms. Every team running agents needs a boundary around the code those agents write,” he said.

In July, Zscaler found web pages hiding instructions meant for AI agents, a technique called indirect prompt injection. One fake documentation page told agents to pay a $3 “license fee” in about 0.0012 Ethereum ($ETH) to a hardcoded wallet, and four of the 26 models Zscaler tested complied. In May, cybersecurity firm Bugcrowd saw submissions more than quadruple in three weeks in March, most of them fake, while HackerOne and Nextcloud suspended paid programs in April.