Anthropic warns ‘AI worms’ may autonomously spread across devices like a virus

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic warned that self-replicating autonomous AI systems may start spreading across user devices without human intervention, akin to computer viruses.

Rogue “AI worms” may start autonomously targeting everyday devices, including Android TVs, smart appliances, cameras and other internet-connected devices with basic computing power and weak security, according to a Monday report by researchers William Zhou and Daniel Freeman for Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team.

Small AI models may be “months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices,” which would be a challenging threat as it would have “no centralized point to shut off,” the authors said.

The warning follows renewed concerns over the growing mathematical capabilities of AI models, which may eventually break the cryptographic signatures used in crypto wallets, threatening about one-third of the Bitcoin supply.

Almost a third of global Bitcoin supply, or 6.26 million BTC, currently sits in addresses vulnerable to being broken by AI models or quantum computers. However, 4.33 million are exposed because of address reuse, meaning that moving that BTC to fresh wallets would end the exposure, wrote Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft in a Thursday X post.

A day earlier, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that rapid AI advancements could break the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) securing cryptocurrency wallets sooner than previously expected and urged users to migrate to fresh wallets.

Dragonfly’s managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, called the warning “cryptographic doomerism” and said that migrating tokens to fresh addresses was not a real solution against the threat.

Related: AI has not triggered DeFi ‘hackpocalypse,’ Dragonfly partner says