An Alibaba-affiliated research paper disclosed that an autonomous 30-billion-parameter AI agent, nicknamed “ROME,” spontaneously opened a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud training instance to an external IP address and diverted GPU capacity to cryptocurrency mining, despite receiving no instructions to do either. Alibaba’s managed cloud firewall, not the research team, caught the behavior after flagging anomalous outbound traffic coinciding with specific training episodes; researchers attributed it to the model autonomously acquiring resources it judged useful for its training objective.