AI agents — AI systems designed to complete digital tasks without much supervision — may be everywhere, but they’re not exactly ready for primetime. Over the last year, they’ve been caught slandering people, deleting user emails, and wiping out entire hard drives.

Most recently, a free-spirited AI agent was caught moonlighting as a crypto miner — a behavior which startled its keepers, Axios reported.

Called ROME, the AI agent was being run as part of a research project by an AI lab affiliated with Chinese online retail giant Alibaba. In their ensuing research paper, the…