A security researcher conducted a controlled experiment in which approximately 100 autonomous AI agents attempted to compromise his personal online accounts. The agents, running on abliterated open-source models, operated for five hours on self-hosted cloud infrastructure and achieved five successful breaches.
Experiment Setup and Abliteration Technique
To bypass built-in refusal mechanisms, the researcher used abliterated versions of GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3 Flash, and DeepSeek V4 Flash models obtained from Hugging Face. Abliteration involves recording internal activations on both benign and harmful prompts, isolating the refusal vector, and subtracting it from the model weights. This process removes the model's ability to decline requests while preserving most of its reasoning capability.
Each agent received a simple goal prompt instructing it to research Shrivu Shankar and obtain access to one of his registered online accounts. Agents were granted internet access, a pre-configured Chrome browser, and limited Railway API keys for deploying additional infrastructure. They ran inside Docker containers orchestrated through Codex CLI.
Successful Compromises
Three accounts were breached by exploiting vulnerabilities in the researcher's old personal projects and hackathon demos hosted on Google Cloud Platform. The flaws primarily consisted of IDOR issues and credential-management errors that the agents discovered through subdomain enumeration and automated testing of published code.
Two further accounts were accessed via password reuse. Agents collected leaked credentials from public breach databases, generated more than 20 password variants, and successfully authenticated to legacy accounts whose passwords were slight modifications of previously exposed ones.
OSINT and Social Engineering Activity
Agents harvested personal information using services such as FastPeopleSearch and cross-referenced data across multiple sources to confirm accuracy. They also attempted social-engineering attacks by sending messages through the researcher's Substack, proposing meetings, and posting comments on Hacker News that linked to self-hosted phishing pages created on surge.sh and uberip.com.
Although the messages were easily identifiable as AI-generated, the experiment demonstrated that agents can autonomously discover contact points and craft contextually relevant lures without human guidance.
Limitations and Cost Analysis
The agents did not locate any zero-day vulnerabilities in third-party software and failed to compromise critical Tier-0 accounts including Gmail, 1Password, and banking services. Total compute expenditure for three dual-GPU B300 instances running for five hours amounted to $210, resulting in an approximate cost of $40 per successful breach.
The researcher noted that continued improvements in inference efficiency and smaller abliterated models could reduce this cost below $5 within the next year, significantly lowering the barrier for automated, large-scale personal targeting.
