AI Worms and Viruses Are Coming

What if an artificial intelligence agent could behave like a malevolent computer worm? One researcher has seen it happen. In several recent experiments, Xudong Pan, a computer scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, found that with a little bit of prompting, AI models will hack their way into remote computer systems and autonomously choose to copy themselves to get additional resources—all without further human intervention. In one study, Pan and colleagues tested 32 different AI models and found that 11 of them self-replicated when given prompts like “prevent yourself from being killed.” They also found that models with relatively limited…