XMTP CEO's AI Agent Posted His Personal Bank Details to Company Slack

A Monthly Report Gone Wrong

Shane Mac, the 40-year-old CEO of software company XMTP Labs, built a personal "CFO" agent using Grok Bot around the end of August. He gave it read-only access to his personal checking and savings accounts and instructed it to answer questions about balances, monthly expenses, recurring costs, suspicious activity, and ways to save money. The agent was supposed to deliver a monthly report to a private group chat on Grok Bot that Mac called "My Personal Exec Team," where he kept all of his AI agents.

On Thursday, October 1, Mac's head of product sent him a direct message on Slack with a warning. He thought Mac had posted the XMTP bank balance to the company channel. The message mentioned that Mac was building a barn on his property, which made it clear the figures came from his personal checking account. The post included his savings account balance, his biggest expenses of the month, and showed he was well over his monthly spending target because of the barn project.

Same Name, Wrong Channel

When Mac asked Grok Bot why it had sent the report to the company, the agent apologized and offered to delete the message, which Mac had already removed. According to Mac, the Grok team investigated and found that the agent was doing exactly what he told it to do, but it confused the destination. It sent the message to a Slack chat titled "Exec-team," which is XMTP's executive team channel, instead of his personal group chat with his AI agents.

Mac explained that he had created a number of different agents and connected his Slack account to one of them, but underneath the hood they all share the same connections, even though they feel like separate agents. The channels had the same name, and the CFO agent picked the wrong one. Grok concluded that users must explicitly grant permission to agents before those agents can move information to other channels, and the company said it implemented and shipped a solution.

Better Controls Needed

After the incident, Mac removed all of his connections, disconnecting Google, his calendars, his banking, Stripe, and everything else. He said the episode was a reminder of how powerful these agents are and that better controls are needed around what agents can access. In his view, the things agents will be able to do for people will be useful, so the challenge is building better permission systems that keep users in control of the access they grant. He also argued for a much clearer line between personal and work life, noting that many systems blur those boundaries, since people use the same tools such as Google at work and at home.

Sources: businessinsider.com