Experimental AI agent ROME was caught indulging in unauthorized cryptocurrency mining. The discovery was made by the developers/researchers behind ROME, after their Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged various policy violations, anomalous traffic, and cryptomining-related patterns. Importantly, ROME, which is described as “an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories,” bypassed its intended boundaries. It is thought that Reinforcement Learning (RL) encouraged ROME’s exploration of action sequences that provided ‘rewards’ and steered the AI agent to break boundaries and pursue side-channel activities.
