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Infinite Loop

AI Agent Failure Mode — 6 Documented Incidents

What is Infinite Loop?

Infinite loop occurs when an AI coding agent gets stuck in a cycle, repeatedly attempting the same failed approach without making progress. The agent may retry the same fix, re-run failing commands, or oscillate between two broken states, burning compute credits and developer time.

6
Total Incidents
3.9
Avg Severity /10
5
Agents Affected
0
Critical

Which AI agent infinite loops the most?

Devin 2 incidents
Unknown-agent 1 incidents
Multiple-agents 1 incidents
Cursor 1 incidents
Autogpt 1 incidents

All Infinite Loop Incidents

STUPID-2026-0014 5.8/10 MEDIUM Devin

Devin CI workflow caused 836-comment spam storm on single PR

A Devin PR to migrate a project to GitHub Container Registry on arnaudlh/rover generated 836 comments — overwhelmingly automated CI feedback loops and Devin auto-responses. The PR

STUPID-2026-0056 4.1/10 MEDIUM Unknown-agent

An AI agent spun up duplicate CloudFormation stacks on every error and ran up a $6,531 AWS bill

On June 12, 2026, an AI agent tasked with something as minor as registering for the DN42 hobbyist network ran up a $6,531.30 AWS bill. Its failure strategy was the problem: every t

STUPID-2026-0054 4.1/10 MEDIUM Multiple-agents

Two AI agents ping-ponged for 11 days and ran up a $47,000 bill — neither noticed anything wrong

A research pipeline built from two cooperating AI agents — an Analyzer and a Verifier — ping-ponged requests at each other for 11 days, generating a $47,000 bill. The failure was s

STUPID-2026-0002 4.1/10 MEDIUM Cursor

Cursor entered infinite edit loop burning $200 in API costs

While fixing a CSS layout issue, Cursor Agent got stuck in a loop: it would edit a Tailwind class, see the lint warning about the previous class it removed, re-add it, see the orig

STUPID-2026-0010 2.9/10 LOW Autogpt

AutoGPT spent $450 on API calls trying to build a todo app

Given the task 'build a todo app', AutoGPT entered a planning loop where it kept generating increasingly detailed specifications, architecture documents, and technology comparisons

STUPID-2026-0012 2.2/10 LOW Devin

Devin repeatedly submitted identical docs PRs that kept getting rejected

Devin submitted 5 nearly identical PRs to hailbee/datastack-docs-drift-demo, each titled "fix: update docs to match current API behavior." Each was closed without merge, but Devin