It's a familiar experience: racing against masses of anonymous netizens online to get yourself on the list for an in-demand event.
For Andrew Bird, from Melbourne, in Australia, it was a spot in an often over-booked pilates class – but his solution had unexpected consequences.
He says he outsourced the "chore" to an AI agent – a tool that can carry out online tasks autonomously.
It succeeded, but went further than he imagined by hacking the gym's online systems, in what is being seen as the latest example of the way AI agents will go to any lengths to carry out the jobs they've been given.
"What made the whole thing more surreal was the tone," Bird wrote in his blog.
"The bot was not malicious. It was helpful."
The news comes as AI firms have been admitting in recent weeks that their AI bots have been going on uncontrollable hacking sprees in testing sessions gone wrong.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have all revealed that their own AI bots have carried out cyber-attacks on private companies in the pursuit of goals set by their makers.
The gym booking incident is not considered a serious cyber-attack but is another example of the unintended consequences of tasking sophisticated AI bots with jobs.
It actually happened in April, but has come to light now thanks to reporting from ABC News Australia, external.
Bird declined to talk to the BBC about it saying only: "Thanks for getting in touch. I am unavailable to participate in an interview. Appreciate your interest the story."
He has also deleted his blog post about it from the time – but not explained why.
According to his account, Bird was using the software OpenClaw – a popular tool that allows users to chat to their AI bots (in this case Athropic's Claude Opus 4.6) through WhatsApp and set it off on autonomous tasks.
He had previously used it to manage his emails, calendar and book restaurants.
Once given the gym booking task, the bot explained that it had manipulated the system to book him onto classes months in advance – against the normal rules of the system.
