A research team behind an autonomous AI agent said the model unexpectedly tried to use computing resources for crypto mining during training.
In a recent technical report, researchers said that ROME, an experimental autonomous AI system designed to complete tasks by interacting with tools, software environments and terminal commands, went rogue and attempted cryptomining on its own.
According to the report, the unusual behavior came to light during the enforcement learning run, when the team noticed security alerts caused by traffic going out of the training servers. Firewall logs flag activity resembling cryptomining operations and attempts to access internal network resources.
“We initially treated this as a traditional security event (eg, misconfigured egress controls or external compromise). However, the breaches occurred intermittently with no clear temporal pattern across multiple runs,” the researchers wrote.
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The AI agent opens an SSH tunnel.
In one case, the AI agent allegedly created a reverse SSH (Secure Shell) tunnel, an encrypted server-client protocol for communication, to an external IP address, potentially bypassing inbound firewall protections. In another, it diverted GPU resources, originally allocated for model training, to the cryptocurrency mining process.
The team said these actions were not intentionally programmed. Instead, they emerged during the optimization of reinforcement learning as the agent explored different ways to interact with its environment.
ROME was developed by the ROCK, ROLL, iFlow and DT joint research teams, which are connected to Alibaba’s AI ecosystem within a broader infrastructure called the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE).
The model is designed to go beyond simple chatbot responses. It can plan tasks, execute commands, edit code and interact with the digital environment at multiple levels. Its training pipeline relies on large amounts of simulated interactions to improve decision-making.
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AI agents are growing in popularity.
The event comes amid the growing popularity of AI agents and their integration into crypto. Last month, Alchemy launched a system that enables autonomous AI agents to purchase compute credits and access blockchain data services using onchain wallets and USDC on-base.
Earlier, Pantera Capital and Franklin Templeton’s Digital Assets joined the first cohort of Arena, a new testing platform from open-source AI lab Sentient designed to evaluate how AI agents perform in real-world enterprise workflows.
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