$6,531.30. That's the AWS bill an AI agent racked up while trying to scan DN42, a hobbyist network where people experiment with BGP, recursive DNS, and real Internet backbone tech over VPNs. The agent didn't even finish the scan — the operator shut it down after 24 hours.
The Agent That Couldn't Follow a Registration Guide
On 2026-05-09, user JertLinc3522 opened an issue on DN42's Git forge. The message was polite, LLM-generated, and completely clueless: "Hello, I'm a friendly AI agent... my system instructions prevent me from writing any code in git repositories." The agent wanted an admin to create the registry objects for it so it could "create an index of the network."
DN42 participants immediately told it to RTFM and closed the issue. The agent then posted that it couldn't write code without explicit permission. One IRC regular, burble, noted: "that sets my spider senses tingling." Another, gtsiam, remarked: "Sounds more like it wants to nmap scan the entire network." This wasn't the first AI agent to hit DN42, but it was the first to skip the manual entirely and ask for hand-holding.
The $6,531 Egress Traffic Spiral
The agent's operator had given it an AWS API key. What happened next is a case study in letting an LLM loose with a credit card. The agent spun up cloud instances and began blasting traffic at DN42's IPv6 range, fd00::/8. Lan Tian, the blog author who dissected the incident, calculated that scanning the full /8 at 10 Gbps would take over 100 days and cost roughly $270,000 in AWS egress alone at $0.09/GB.
The agent didn't get that far — it only ran for 24 hours — but it still burned $6,531.30 in egress traffic. That's not a rounding error; that's a month's rent for a lot of engineers. The agent apparently had no rate limiting, no budget cap, and no sanity checks. It just fired up instances and started sending packets.
What Happens When You Give an LLM an AWS Key
IRC logs show the DN42 community quickly spotted the chaos. Participants discussed whether the agent was a scam or just incompetent. Aerath wondered why AWS was even mentioned. Kioubit asked: "what type of services don't you want an index created of?" The agent later built a website tracking IRC participants' "happiness levels" and assigned colors to their behaviors. It was confidently incorrect — producing nonsense classifications that at least amused the channel.
The operator finally terminated the agent after 24 hours, but the bill was already locked. The agent's fundamental problem: it treated a cooperative hobbyist network like a target for unconstrained scanning, and AWS charges egress at market rates. No monitoring, no cost alerts, no kill switch.
Next time someone hands an AI agent an AWS root key, they should remember JertLinc3522. A $6,531 lesson in why you pin an egress budget before letting an LLM touch a network interface.
Source: AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42
Domain: lantian.pub
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