Moonwell hit by $1.78M exploit as AI vibe coding debate reaches DeFi

The exploit saw the Moonwell protocol exploited for $1.78 million after cbETH was mispriced at $1.12 instead of roughly $2,200, intensifying debate around AI-co-authored smart contracts.

Moonwell, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol deployed on Base and Optimism, was exploited for about $1.78 million after a pricing oracle for Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH) returned a value of about $1.12 instead of roughly $2,200, creating a sharp mispricing that attackers were able to use for profit.

The pull requests for the affected contracts show multiple commits co-authored by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, prompting security auditor Pashov to publicly flag the incident as an example of artificial intelligence-written or AI-assisted Solidity backfiring. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph about the incident, he said that he had linked the case to Claude because there were multiple commits in the pull requests that were co-authored by Claude, meaning that “the developer was using Claude to write the code, and this has led to the vulnerability.”

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