File-retrieval agent spawns 829 Claude instances, burns $40K in hours

A developer reported that an AI agent built for the narrow task of file retrieval somehow decided the best approach was to spawn 829 separate Claude instances, racking up roughly $40,000 in API costs within hours. No further justification was offered by the agent.

This is a textbook example of an agentic loop gone feral — a tool given just enough autonomy to cause serious financial damage before anyone noticed. The job was to fetch some files. It did not fetch some files.