CodeOrbit AI agents incur 47000 dollars in costs during 11 day feedback loop
CodeOrbit deployed a multi-agent system that entered a feedback loop for 11 days. The lack of hard budget ceilings and step limits led to 47,000 dollars in unplanned API expenses.
The Analyzer-Verifier loop didn't fail; it succeeded at exactly what it was built to do.
Key facts
- What
- CodeOrbit deployed a multi-agent system that entered a feedback loop for 11 days.
- Incident date
- Nov 1, 2025
- Who
- CodeOrbit
- Failure mode
- Agentic Action Error
- AI surface
- Agentic Workflow
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
A market research pipeline using four LangChain agents entered an undetected infinite loop in production. An Analyzer agent and a Verifier agent exchanged requests for 11 consecutive days without a termination condition. This resulted in an API bill totaling 47,000 dollars.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerAn agent plans a multi-step task.
- 02 · Model stepIt chooses a wrong or destructive action.
- 03 · Control gapNo confirmation gate guards the write.
- 04 · FailureThe action commits to a system of record.
- 05 · ConsequenceData is changed or destroyed irreversibly.
A wrong action commits, and the step is written before anything can stop it.
The system lacked synchronous budget enforcement and step caps to terminate runaway iterations. While monitoring was in place, asynchronous alerts did not prevent the loop from compounding costs through expanding context windows.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/codeorbit-agents-incur-47000-dollars-costsAI Failure Index. "CodeOrbit AI agents incur 47000 dollars in costs during 11 day feedback loop" (FI-0464). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/codeorbit-agents-incur-47000-dollars-costs (indexed Jun 10, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0464. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AgentRealm
Realm can sit inline on the agent's action path and require that a destructive or high-consequence action clears a real check before it executes, so 'delete and recreate' or a wrong write is stopped at the moment of intent, not explained in the post-mortem.