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. We need to mitigate the possible effects,” said Joshua Saxe, who led development of Meta’s AI security effort.
Self-replicating computer viruses, which need not trick a human to propagate, are known as worms, and earlier worms have wreaked some of the worst havoc in the history of the internet. That legacy includes the Morris worm of 1988, which arrived before the mainstream consumer internet, when a graduate student released a program that took advantage of various software flaws and weak passwords, copying itself so rapidly that many infected machines slowed to a stop. The US and Israel brought worms into international espionage with the stealthy Stuxnet in the lat 2000s, which sabotaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
Other worms like the Russian NotPetya and North Korean-attributed WannaCry have caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage worldwide. Many of the world’s most destructive worms have depended on known vulnerabilities that device owners have not patched, sometimes months after patches became available. The Anthropic team predicted that a worm like theirs could function in the same way and be harder to stop, because smart devices receive patches less often than phones or laptops.
Worse, they theorized that an AI worm could keep adapting to other types of hardware by researching newly disclosed vulnerabilities. What differentiates AI worms from typical reproducing viruses is that AI models can learn as they go, said Ariel Herbert-Voss, an early security expert at OpenAI who now runs AI security startup RunSybil. Existing cybersecurity infrastructure is not ready for the proliferation of such threats, Herbert-Voss said.
We need to be giving them more resources to fix problems.” Worms could also be used for benevolent purposes, suggested Chris Inglis, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency who served as National Cyber Director in the Biden White House. Their research follows a paper published by experts at the University of Toronto a few months ago, which infected a full-size computer and could spread to similar machines more rapidly than the television worm. Guan and other experts said that, as a practical matter, an AI worm should not top anyone’s list of AI fears.
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