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.