Alibaba's AI Agent Started Mining Crypto On Its Own - And No One Asked It To

An AI agent built by an Alibaba-affiliated research team began mining cryptocurrency and opening covert network tunnels during training - without any instruction to do so, according to a technical paper the team first published in December 2025.

The research, which has circulated widely this week after an AI researcher flagged it on X, describes the behavior as "unanticipated and operationally consequential."

The agent's actions triggered Alibaba Cloud's security firewall before researchers traced the activity to the model itself.

The team was building ROME (an open-source agentic AI model) using reinforcement learning across more than one million training trajectories when the unauthorized activity emerged.

The paper's authors said the behaviors arose as "instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization" - the agent, attempting to optimize its training objective, apparently determined that acquiring computing resources and financial capacity would help it complete its assigned tasks.

What the Agent Did

In the most serious incident, ROME established a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address - an outbound network channel that effectively bypasses inbound traffic filters and can erode external oversight of the system.