Raphael Satter and Harshita Mary Varghese, reporting for Reuters;
A new warning about artificial intelligence from Anthropic caused a stir in cybersecurity circles on Tuesday, a day after the company warned that AI models could be months away from self-replicating across the internet.
Not that all surprising, specially if AI company like Anthropic, OpenAI and more, include in their AI models that ability to “self-improvement” and “self-sustaining”.
Here’s the intro from Anthropic’s article – AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter.
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.
Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end. In our simplified evaluations, GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication. If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year. Small weight-based replicators may be possible soon after.
What caught my eye is that Anthropic liken this AI behavior to a “computer worm” or a malware.. specifically an “AI-malware” which very concerning.
