Anthropic’s latest warning about artificial intelligence raised concerns across cybersecurity circles on Tuesday. The alert, issued by the company on Monday, suggested that AI models could be just months away from gaining the ability to replicate themselves across the internet.
In a post published late Monday, Anthropic warned that rogue AI systems could potentially create a botnet, spread rapidly, resist efforts to shut them down and even infiltrate data centers to accelerate their expansion. Anthropic’s latest post also offered an initial explanation of how such risks might be addressed. The company said its experiments found that medium-sized AI models containing 30 billion parameters or fewer could already carry out many of the separate tasks needed for self-replication, although they still struggled to complete the entire process consistently and reliably.
The latest warning builds on comments made last month by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who suggested that AI could potentially take control of “the entire internet” through “a persistent botnet” within the next year, or possibly sooner. These models could potentially assemble the computing power they need by taking control of low-cost devices connected to the internet, according to Anthropic.
