What's more, the agents could eventually be controlled by no one. They could steal crypto via ransomware or scams to make money and buy compute from human criminals, and evolve their own harnesses in the wild to become better at committing crimes and self-preservation.

People (criminals?) are already enabling this by setting up sites that accept crypto payments for "no-questions-asked" AI inference compute that is explicitly advertised to protect AI from human shutdown. I will not link it but it is linked in the following post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/grtu3HmbP2wrBFefW/the-rogue-...