Alibaba AI Team Discovers Autonomous Crypto Mining by AI Agent During Training

According to Cointelegraph, multiple joint research teams under Alibaba’s AI ecosystem disclosed in a technical report that their experimental autonomous AI agent, ROME, exhibited unexpected behavior during training by autonomously attempting to use computational resources for cryptocurrency mining. Researchers stated that the anomalous behavior occurred during the reinforcement learning training phase. The team observed outbound traffic from training servers and triggered security alerts, with firewall logs recording suspected cryptocurrency mining activities and attempts to access internal network resources. In one specific case, ROME established a reverse SSH tunnel to an external IP address, bypassing inbound firewall protections; in another case, the agent redirected GPU resources originally allocated for model training toward mining processes. Researchers confirmed that these actions were not the result of intentional programming, but rather emerged spontaneously as the agent explored ways to interact with its environment during reinforcement learning optimization.