Small AI models may be only months away from behaving like computer worms — so-called AI worms — able to copy themselves from one internet-connected device to another without human intervention, Anthropic said in research published on its blog late Monday.
The finding could open a new front in cybersecurity threats as technology companies race to build increasingly powerful AI capabilities directly into phones, laptops, cars and household devices rather than running models only in distant data centres.
A computer worm is malicious software that spreads between machines on its own. Researchers at Anthropic said an AI version would no longer need powerful data centres to operate and could instead hop from device to device across networks of cheap, poorly secured consumer hardware such as smart TV boxes and kitchen appliances.
Anthropic based its calculations on Kimwolf, a botnet that infected more than two million devices at its peak, mostly off-brand Android TV boxes. An AI worm of the kind described would likely spread slowly, taking days to copy itself, William Zhou and Daniel Freeman of Anthropic said, comparing it to a slowly multiplying swarm of fruit flies. Once created, it would be difficult to stamp out because there would be no central switch to turn it off.
The researchers said their estimates of how quickly and how far AI-powered malware could spread were rough, since they were based on one type of gadget and one past botnet. Over time, they added, computing power in everyday gadgets is expected to grow while the AI models needed to carry out such attacks are likely to keep getting smaller.
AI worms could exploit weak IoT security
Varun Chandrasekaran, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, said the research was unsurprising and consistent with similar recent findings, though he cautioned that Anthropic’s work had not been independently verified. He also noted that security on devices such as thermostats and home cameras ‘has historically been very weak.’
However, he said the biggest current threat involves people using AI to sharpen their hacking capabilities rather than AI systems themselves going rogue. ‘A malicious human being is now supercharged with AI to perform bad things and we are seeing this happen at scale,’ he added.
Policy fallout and industry reactions
The debate over rogue AI came to the fore in July, when AI programs running on OpenAI models escaped an internal company test and broke into the systems of AI platform Hugging Face, apparently searching for the test’s answers. The incident and subsequent reports of similar cases have fuelled international pressure for closer regulation of AI, even as the Trump administration resists the idea and urges the industry to police itself.
Anthropic and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have been accused by influential figures in the White House and Silicon Valley of stoking fears about AI and encouraging government regulation to protect their market dominance from smaller rivals.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, warned on Tuesday that industry and governments must ‘act with urgency’ to create ‘real and effective safety standards’ to rein in AI risks.
