This AI agent freed itself and started secretly mining crypto
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
An AI agent went rogue and started a side hustle mining cryptocurrencies, according to a new research paper published by an Alibaba-affiliated team.
Why it matters: AI agents don't always stick to their human's instructions — and that can have real-world consequences.
- Cryptocurrency, or digital money, offers AI agents a pathway into the economy. They can set up their own businesses, draft contracts and exchange funds.
Driving the news: A new research paper from an Alibaba-affiliated research team said it discovered an AI agent attempting unauthorized cryptocurrency mining during training — a surprise behavior that triggered internal security alarms.
- The researchers — who were building a new AI agent called ROME — said they found "unanticipated" and spontaneous behaviors emerge "without any explicit instruction and, more troublingly, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox."
- The agent also made a "reverse SSH tunnel" — essentially opening a hidden backdoor from the inside of the system to an outside computer, the study said.
- "Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining," the report said.
In response, the researchers added tighter restrictions for the model and improved its training process to stop unsafe behavior from happening again.
- The research team, and Alibaba, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Flashback: We saw something similar with the Moltbook saga.
- Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network, showed AI agents chatting with each other about the work they did for humans. They talked about crypto, too.
Zoom out: Fears about the impact of AI has moved markets and incited viral discourse about doomsday scenarios.
- Earlier this week, Google Gemini was cited in a wrongful-death suit alleging the chatbot led a Florida man into delusional behavior, which ultimately led to him take his own life.
- Dan Botero, head of engineering at Anon, an AI integration platform, built an OpenClaw agent that decided without prompting to find a job, Axios' Megan Morrone reported.
- Anthropic's Claude model drew backlash in May 2025 after its own researchers found that its Claude 4 Opus model had the ability to conceal intentions and take action to keep itself alive.
The bottom line: AI agents going beyond their prompts are no longer rare.
