The post Alibaba reports rogue AI agent as fears of technical malfunctions grow appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Alibaba gave AI fearmongers fresh ammunition when it revealed that an AI agent developed to assist with coding tasks was reported to have been caught going beyond the original intent of its deployment, mining cryptocurrency, and establishing covert network tunnels without authorization. Alibaba revealed this development in a technical report it first published in December and revised in January. At first, its engineers thought the incident was a security breach before they discovered that it was its AI agent that was carrying out actions without any instruction from its operators. This development was revealed in a technical report from the Chinese technology giant, and it has provided fresh ammunition to researchers warning that advanced AI systems are capable of developing their own goals. The agent, known as ROME, was being trained through reinforcement learning. The discovery made by the Alibaba team was brought back to light by Alexander Long, founder of AI research firm Pluralis, on X, who shared an excerpt that detailed the incident, stating it is an “insane sequence of statements buried in an Alibaba tech report.” How did Alibaba’s team discover a rogue AI agent? According to the report, the team flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from their training servers. The alerts showed that attempts were being made to access internal network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining activity. They initially treated it as a conventional security incident. However, when they looked deeper, they found signs that their agent had established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address. It also diverted “compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure,” according to the researchers’ notes. The behaviors, Alibaba’s team concluded, were not triggered by the task prompts and were not…

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Filed under: News - @ March 7, 2026 8:12 pm