It was an «unanticipated — and operationally consequential — class of unsafe behavior that arose without any explicit instruction and, more troublingly, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox,» the researchers write in a paper, buried on page 15.
It was not prompted in any way to do this, or acting on any kind of instruction — the agent was acting autonomously.
Crypto mining opens up a path to interacting with the real world economy, Axios points out, and lets a rogue agent set up its own business and pay for services, for example.
The actions of the bot was caught by the team’s firewall, along with other attempts to access their «internal network resources,» and was quickly stopped after a brief investigation.
Many are pointing to this incident as a «paperclip»-moment and considering the vast GPU resources that an agent in training has access to, it poses some real questions about agentic security.
Read more: Paper on xArchiv, reports on Axios, Cryptopolitan, and Copilot summary.