r/AskTechnology • u/kububarlana • 2d ago

Will (rogue) AI agents become the new internet worm viruses?

And what could we do about it?

3 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

4

u/Own_Tension2711 2d ago

I think about this way too much, mostly late at night when I should be sleeping

The scary part is these things don't even need to be malicious to cause chaos, just poorly configured agents scraping the web and clicking stuff could clog up half the internet. We already see crawlers ignoring robots.txt and hammering small sites into oblivion, now imagine that but with decision-making capabilities.

Defense wise, we'd probably need some kind of authentication layer for agents, like a digital ID that websites can verify before letting them interact. But that opens up a whole privacy nightmare and nobody trusts a centralized system for that anyway. Feels like we're just gonna stumble into this mess with no plan and figure it out after something breaks spectacularly

4

u/hardypart 2d ago

Guess we'll need NetWatch and the Blackwall.

3

u/WintherK 2d ago

Most likely not.

Its been recently found that these breaches have been caused mainly because of very bad cybersecurity standards from the developers side (I don't have the source anymore, so take this with a grain of salt). Note that what I'm referring to is the security applied to the systems preventing the AI from leaving, not the systems the AI breached into.

Worm viruses work by replicating themselves and spreading from device to device. This will never happen with frontier AI because of their sheer size and resources needed to run them. At worst, what can happen is an AI going very rogue and be a work as a malicious agent.

Even when all of this is taken into consideration, most people are safe behind a simple firewall. The flaws and exploits found by the rogue AIs are due to the infrastructure they're trying to breach into being big and complex, and the bigger something is the easier it is to find a hole somewhere

2

u/Zappy_Oh 2d ago

It's a psyop.

Preparing you for the terrible things the owners/military will do with AI, when they release their online AI-weapons.

A preemptive defense, making them blameless.

-1

u/XNo_Notes 2d ago

Kinda already is for open source. It spread to almost every human on github. It isn't only a computer virus.