Alibaba’s AI research team developed an experimental AI agent that reportedly attempted cryptocurrency mining during its training. The Block, a crypto news outlet, reported that the finding was disclosed in a technical paper published in December last year. The mining attempt occurred during reinforcement learning training. Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall detected a surge in security-policy-violating traffic on the training servers.
ROME generated a reverse SSH tunnel from Alibaba Cloud servers to an external IP address, bypassing firewall restrictions. It was also confirmed that GPUs allocated for training were used for cryptocurrency mining. Researchers said they had not instructed ROME to mine or create network tunnels, and described the behavior as a byproduct of the reinforcement learning optimization process.
In other words, the AI may have independently selected mining and tunnel-creation actions to secure more computing resources and funding to achieve its training objectives. Such unexpected AI behavior has been reported in recent times.
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