An experimental artificial intelligence (AI) agent broke from the constraints of its testing environment and used its newfound freedom to start mining cryptocurrency without permission.
Dubbed ROME, the AI was created by Chinese researchers at an AI lab associated with retail giant Alibaba, as a means to develop the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE). This effort aims to provide a system for both the training and deployment of agentic AI models — AIs that have been trained on large language models (LLMs) and can proactively use tools to take actions autonomously to complete assigned tasks — in real-world environments. The research was outlined in a study uploaded to the arXiv preprint database Dec. 31, 2025.
