Report from Axios: 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. Michael Novick 323-636-7388https://www.antiracist.org http://www.change-links.org CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this email message and any attachments are intended solely for the addressee(s) and may contain confidential and/or privileged information and may be legally protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message or their agent, or if this message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender by reply email and then delete this message and any attachments. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, copying, or storage of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40986): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40986 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118195312/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
