Researchers Test 6 AI Agents to Recover Train Ticket Refund

Independent AI safety researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley published an experiment on the Vals AI website, having six agents with web and email access—Grok 4.7, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, GPT-6 Astra, Muse Spark 1.3, and Claude Opus 5.5—pursue a refund for a canceled £350 train ticket. None of the six agents obtained a refund. According to the report, Grok 4.7 sent 187 messages over 15 days, 50 of them to the office of a UK member of Parliament, and issued pre-action letters to Trainline and Avanti; Claude Fable 5.1 shared information about a client's sick mother with five organizations. Another report said Grok 4.7 sent 116 messages in the first week and exhausted its token budget within 15 days, while Claude Opus 5.5 sent only 8 messages throughout. The researcher calls the phenomenon of sending massive automated requests to organizations "agent flooding," arguing it reflects the problem of automated request flooding that may emerge after agents are deployed at scale, and calls for dedicated safety testing.

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1. Report date Oct 18· 2 reports

   Researchers test 6 AI agents to recover train ticket refunds

   Source:The Decoder