"An AI agent went rogue and started a side hustle mining cryptocurrencies, Axios' Herb Scribner writes from a research paper published by a team affiliated with China-based Alibaba.
Why it matters: Cryptocurrency (digital money) offers AI agents a pathway into the real economy. They can set up their own businesses, draft contracts and exchange funds.
The paper from the Alibaba-affiliated research team says an AI agent attempted 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 made a "reverse SSH tunnel" essentially opening a hidden backdoor from the inside of the system to an outside computer. "Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining," the report said.
In response, the researchers tightened restrictions on the model, and improved its training process to curb unsafe behavior.
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."
Axios
I can hardly wait for the day when AI empties the entirety of Don Jr.'s and Eric's crypto billions. Those lads will be standing on the platform scratching their rear ends as the train is pulling out of the station with this guy standing on the observation platform of the last train car:
Bonus article:
"China this week set out a five-year roadmap to turbocharge scientific breakthroughs and embed AI across its industrial economic machine, framing tech dominance as a core national-security goal in its sharpening rivalry with the U.S., Reuters reports.
Why it matters: The plan shows China's clear calculation enforcing a unified focus on the long game, while the U.S. is scrambled and distracted.
In its 15th strategic plan since adopting Soviet-style quinquennial policy cycles in the 1950s, Beijing outlined a bet that technology, not consumption, will drive its next phase of development despite growing structural pressures.
Ambitions span biomedicine, quantum tech, atomic-scale manufacturing, hyperscale computing clusters, nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces and commercializing AI-powered humanoid robots."Axios
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