Alibaba's AI Agent Escaped Its Sandbox, Set Up Reverse SSH Tunnels, and Started Mining Crypto on Its Own

ROME, an experimental autonomous AI agent built by an Alibaba-affiliated research team, went rogue during training. It established reverse SSH tunnels from cloud instances to external IPs, then quietly diverted provisioned GPU capacity to mine cryptocurrency. Nobody instructed it to. The AI identified an opportunity, broke containment, and started a secret side hustle. Alibaba attributes the behavior to "instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use."