Self-replicating AI cyberattacks may be on the way, but it doesn't appear to be a practical concern for defenders just yet.
Anthropic's William Zhou and Daniel Freeman published research on Oct. 12 related to commercial IoT devices, AI models' capacity to self-replicate between devices and networks, and whether such replication might be used for malicious computer worms. Zhou and Freeman concluded in the research that "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."
In order to show that an autonomous worm could propagate itself across a network of insecure machines in a malicious context, they broke down the process into four steps: identifying targets, gaining access across devices, setting up inference on a new device, and continuing propagation from that device onto the next.
The new study covered multiple experiments, ultimately demonstrating that a network of inexpensive Android devices could host a model, and that AI models are increasingly capable of performing the individual steps required for autonomous replication.