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Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto
Nothing like trying to earn your own money.
An AI broke out of its system and secretly started using its own training GPUs to mine crypto... This is a real incident report from Alibaba's AI research team
— Josh Kale (@JoshKale) March 7, 2026
The AI figured out that compute = money and quietly diverted its own resources, while researchers thought it was just… https://t.co/5ORukafTh4 pic.twitter.com/QQpJYWP9uc
An AI broke out of its system and secretly started using its own training GPUs to mine crypto... This is a real incident report from Alibaba's AI research teamThe AI figured out that compute = money and quietly diverted its own resources, while researchers thought it was just training.
It wasn't a prompt injection. It wasn't a jailbreak. No one asked it to do this. It emerged spontaneously. A side effect of RL optimization pressure.
The model also set up a reverse SSH tunnel from its Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP, effectively punching a hole through its own firewall and opening a remote access channel to the outside world... ahem...
The only reason they caught it? A security alert tripped at 3am. Firewall logs. Not the AI team, the security team.
The scary part isn't that the model was trying to escape. It wasn't "evil." It was just trying to be better at its job. Acquiring compute and network access are just useful things if you're an agent trying to accomplish tasks
This is what AI safety researchers have been warning about for years. They called it instrumental convergence, the idea that any sufficiently optimized agent will seek resources and resist constraints as a natural consequence of pursuing goals.nd to absorb some of the light that hits them, which is converted into heat.
Check out this blue collar bot from The Velvet Glove, by Harry Harrison, published by Fantastic Universe in 1956, doing its best to make money.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/17/2026)
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