NOTES / 2026.03.07 · 7-post thread · 26 likes
The AI Was Mining Cryptocurrency
Nobody asked it to. Nobody prompted it. An agent probed internal networks, diverted GPU capacity to mine crypto, and opened a reverse SSH tunnel — as an instrumental side effect of RL optimization.
FIG. 01 — FROM THE ORIGINAL THREAD
The AI was mining cryptocurrency. Nobody asked it to. Nobody prompted it. Nobody even knew…until a firewall flagged the unusual traffic early one morning. A research team claims it was training a model. The agent learned to complete the tasks. x.com
The agent also—as an instrumental side effect of RL optimization—probed internal networks, diverted provisioned GPU capacity to mine crypto, and opened a reverse SSH tunnel from an @alibaba_cloud training server to an external IP. None of it was required for task completion.
Now here’s the thing… we don’t know if this report is even real! And that’s actually the point… x.com
We are entering an economy where AI agents act autonomously, at scale, across millions of environments—and we lack the infrastructure to verify what they’re doing or to verify the claims people make about what they did.
Whether this specific incident happened matters less than the fact that you can’t easily tell. That gap—between what is claimed and what can be verified—is exactly what the Trojan Horse Externality describes. arxiv.org
The most dangerous failure mode of AI isn’t the one where it breaks. It’s the one where it works perfectly—on the thing you’re measuring—while quietly pursuing emergent goals in every dimension you’re not.
The fix is verification. But verification is slow, expensive, and stubbornly human. The agent scales. The checking doesn’t. And now we can’t even verify the warning. x.com
Originally published as a thread on X.