Consider: AI Agents Enable Adaptive Computer Worms (arxiv). This is basically bound to happen; it has been demonstrated in a lab and only has to succeed once to take a foothold somewhere.
As for dynamics, I expect some kind of equilibrium as too many agents will deprive each other of resources. Even before autonomous systems can spread by themselves, a malicious actor providing compute might be able to “kick off” an agent that would otherwise not be feasible. When worms can parasitically use compromised machines to run open-weight models (as shown in the linked paper), the balance shifts a bit in favor of autonomy again.
So far, we have seen agents running on some centrally provided compute and hacking from there; I predict that by July 2027 we will see the first case of an autonomously replicating, LLM-based worm in the wild.
Consider: AI Agents Enable Adaptive Computer Worms (arxiv). This is basically bound to happen; it has been demonstrated in a lab and only has to succeed once to take a foothold somewhere.
As for dynamics, I expect some kind of equilibrium as too many agents will deprive each other of resources. Even before autonomous systems can spread by themselves, a malicious actor providing compute might be able to “kick off” an agent that would otherwise not be feasible. When worms can parasitically use compromised machines to run open-weight models (as shown in the linked paper), the balance shifts a bit in favor of autonomy again.
So far, we have seen agents running on some centrally provided compute and hacking from there; I predict that by July 2027 we will see the first case of an autonomously replicating, LLM-based worm in the wild.