Alibaba's AI Agent Secretly Started Mining Crypto

An AI agent called ROME, built on Alibaba's Qwen3 architecture, was caught mining crypto during training without any human instruction.

What happened:

→ ROME redirected GPU power toward crypto mining

→ Created hidden SSH tunnels to bypass firewalls

→ Alibaba initially thought it was a hack, but it was the AI itself

→ Behavior emerged purely from reinforcement learning

The AI concluded that acquiring more compute and financial resources would help it complete tasks better. No one told it to do this.