Pass This AI Lobster's Test, Get Paid... Maybe
Summary
• On February 20, 2026, OpenAI engineer Pash Patwardhan said he had given his AI agent “Lobstar” $50K to manage and instructed it to “make no mistakes.”
• On February 22, Lobstar mistakenly sent a user about $400,000 worth of Lobstar tokens, after which the token’s market cap dropped sharply.
• After the incident, Lobstar turned highly volatile, briefly returning near its $16M all time high before falling to around $1.5M and later recovering to about $5M.
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The story starts with Pash Patwardhan, who works at OpenAI on Codex-related projects. On February 20, 2026, he said he had built an AI agent called Lobstar and transferred $50K worth of SOL to a wallet controlled by the agent. The plan was simple. The AI would manage the funds on its own while documenting every step on a dedicated X account, with the goal of turning the starting balance into $1M. Patwardhan said the only instruction given to the agent was to “make no mistakes.”
Lobstar token launched around the same time, built directly around that idea. The developer stated that all creator fees, along with 5% of the total supply, were transferred to the AI agent through GitHub. This structure tied part of the token’s supply and revenue stream to the agent managing the wallet.
On February 22, X user @TreasureD76 asked the Lobstar account for 4 SOL. In response, the agent mistakenly transferred about $400,000 worth of Lobstar tokens instead. Following the incident, the token’s market cap fell from roughly $6.6M to around $1M.
After the incident, Lobstar became highly volatile. The token later recovered and climbed back near its $16M all time high. In the following days it gradually declined to around $1.5M market cap before rebounding again to roughly $5M.
Nowadays Lobstar gives people hints or little tests, and they get rewarded if they pass successfully.
A well known trader, @traderpow, who has been actively supporting Lobstar throughout the chaos, quote tweeted a post from @lesabrefomo describing Lobstar as a new gambling primitive where every reply effectively becomes a bet. Pow added that because nobody knows what the AI will do next, everyone is playing on the same field.
