What are self-replicating ‘AI worms’, and why is Anthropic worried about them?

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The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year…

Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about.

Yet a report this week from Anthropic’s offensive research team grabbed attention by describing a new, practical threat, one devoid of human characteristics or apocalyptic musings. The red team, as such internal testers are called, said it created a malicious AI program that spread autonomously through internet-connected “smart” televisions and could do the same inside other ordinary devices.

While machines running AI usually need a fair amount of computing power, the researchers said that their program split parts of itself among 15 televisions and was still able to function by using a bit of power from each.

In addition to evoking the horcruxes that kept pieces of Lord Voldemort’s soul alive within objects in the Harry Potter series, the report alarmed some professionals because the generally weak security of smart televisions and many other “internet of things” devices would be very hard to correct, even with a concerted effort.

“It’s something to worry about just like every other wave of cyber-attacks. We need to mitigate the possible effects,” said Joshua Saxe, who led development of Meta’s AI security effort. “I’m concerned right now that folks in the cybersecurity community are not taking these kinds of real risks as seriously as they should be.”

The damage of such “AI worms” could be astonishingly large.