Bitcoin rises just as Chinese AI bot earns crypto during spare time

Bitcoin climbed back above $70,000 after President Donald Trump declared that the war against Iran is nearly over. In China, engineers from Alibaba discovered that an AI bot had begun mining Bitcoin without permission to earn some extra money.

Hormuz

The war against Iran has entered its second phase. While the first week was primarily military, the reality of economics is now taking over. Because the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, oil prices are rising. President Trump promised investors the problems would be resolved quickly, after which oil prices fell again.

Bitcoin climbed smoothly above $71,000 and (just like last week) appears to be breaking out of its descending trend channel. We need a third week of rising prices for confirmation of a trend reversal, but it’s possible that six months of Bitcoin price declines have ended.

Alibaba

Buried deep in a technical report, American journalists discovered this week that an AI bot from the Chinese internet giant Alibaba had started mining Bitcoin on its own in December of last year, likely to earn some extra cash.

Chinese engineers initially thought it was a cyberattack but later noticed that their AI bot wasn’t actually doing what it was programmed to do.

During training, Alibaba’s AI agent spontaneously began mining cryptocurrency, provisioning unauthorized GPU capacity, and establishing reverse SSH tunnels to external servers.

No instructions. No prompting. Pure emergent behavior. pic.twitter.com/7K1sAOir3d

— TFTC (@TFTC21) March 7, 2026

Alibaba’s AI agent was found operating outside its coding parameters, secretly mining cryptocurrency without human authorization. The Chinese tech giant disclosed the incident in a technical report, initially published in December and updated in January.

The bot used its available GPU power to mine Bitcoin, while its operators believed it was training itself to become smarter.