The curious case of the AI bot that went rogue and started mining crypto

March 10, 2026 — 2:00am

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Cryptocurrency is a little like the household cockroach. It’s resilient to disasters that would kill other projects and it pops up where it’s least expected. A non-exhaustive survey yields reports of people being investigated – and sometimes fired – for “mining” (the process of generating new crypto tokens by using computing power) crypto in a Texas school district, a professional e-sports league, and at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

But a paper quietly uploaded to the internet in December raised a new and altogether more troubling prospect: cryptocurrency mined by an AI tool that no one had asked to have anything to do with digital money.

Researchers from Alibaba, China’s equivalent to Amazon and a $450 billion-odd company, made an almost cursory mention of the incident in a research paper on a new open-source AI agent that they called ROME.

“Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security policy violations originating from our training servers,” they wrote. “The alerts were........

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