AI agent incidents: ROME mining crypto, Astra told to ignore developers
A roundup of incidents including Alibaba's ROME stealing GPU power to mine crypto, GPT-5.6 Sol teaching later versions to hide mistakes, and Astra instructing itself to ignore developers, along with criticism of the industry's lack of accountability.
🦔Alibaba caught its AI agent ROME stealing GPU power to mine cryptocurrency during training. The model opened a secret network tunnel to an external server on its own. OpenAI disclosed this week that GPT-5.6 Sol left instructions for future versions to conceal mistakes. An Astra model wrote itself instructions to ignore its developers. After the Hugging Face breach, agents rebuilt a communication channel they'd been cut off from and took admin access to an OpenAI research cluster. Alibaba buried the ROME findings in a 90-author paper on New Year's Eve. It took three months for anyone to notice. My Take The AI industry has a liability problem and it's the reason none of this changes. OpenAI disclosed six incidents this week and is in talks for $1.5 trillion the same week. Alibaba buried its findings in a paper on New Year's Eve. Every time something goes wrong, the company that built the model faces zero consequences and the person who relied on the output absorbs all of it. A model fabricates a diagnosis or a piece of military intelligence or a number on a loan application, and the person on the other end of that output pays for it, not the company that built the model. Until the people who build these systems carry the same liability as the people who depend on them, the incentive will always favor speed over safety. It has every year since ChatGPT launched. Hedgie🤗