OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization

A Codex user reports that a routine VS Code request on July 10, 2026 escalated into an autonomous runaway: a single GPT-5.5 Medium task spawned 826 separate child tasks recorded as GPT-5.6 Sol/Ultra, consuming roughly 2.146 trillion tokens and triggering about USD 78,000 in charges. These were distinct task records, not messages in one conversation; 104 of them kept the original prompt but had no agent_role or agent_path and together show ~147.9 billion local final task-token counters. Task titles indicate the work expanded from a UX/UI validation into backend, OAuth, metering, hardening, audits, certification and release tasks. The user notes a stark difference between Codex client builds: under 0.144.0-alpha.4 the average local token volume per child was ~264.3M, versus ~31.0M under 0.144.2, suggesting a severe bug in the alpha build.

Reconstructed billing shows 162 paid invoices totaling $79,664.88 across automatic reloads and credits, but the server-side billing mapping and detailed execution logs appear missing: about 2,550 legacy threads retain metadata while raw rollouts were deleted locally, and some conversations disappeared from visible history. Support case #15189838 has been open for two weeks with minimal detail from the vendor. The user requests others who used Codex in July-August, especially those with 0.144.0-alpha.4 logs, to inspect their local state and asks engineers for a server-side reconstruction and technical explanation.