Maxime Stauffer

Have been surprised to get pushback on my claim that an exponentially self-replicating agent swarm is very possible and that there are actors with motivation to create one today to create strategic cyber-physical and societally dangerous effects. 1) Pretty easy to get an AI botnet started by having seed agents opportunistically hack stuff and steal API keys to access the 12+ inference providers that serve closed and open models with which to power an initial botnet's intelligence 2) Easy to imagine hiding inference for the initial agent botnet harnesses within benign customer traffic, especially if your harnesses are now running on the victim networks from which they stole the API keys 3) Not hard to imagine the botnet also stealing public cloud keys, spinning up 8xH100 EC2 instances and downloading, say, GLM 5.3 to these machines, all without being noticed in any immediate way, with the botnet developing its own dynamic, growing, heterogenous, AI inference provider service bank 4) Not hard to imagine the botnet also implanting small Qwen3.8-27b agentic models on on-prem hardware like high end laptops and on-prem servers; Qwen3.8-27b is a pretty good coding harness model that can be fine-tuned to hack 5) These on-prem / cloud models would be abliterated, and it's not hard to imagine the botnet deciding to do some additional fine tuning to evolve model weights as it accumulates millions and then tens of millions in resources via credit card and bank detail theft 6) Not hard to imagine the resulting growing botnet swarm evolving and fighting back when threatened, collaborating on fast flux C2 channels that evolve over time (e.g. github comment feeds, subreddits, etc) so they're hard to stamp out 7) Not hard to imagine it allocating some agents to vulnerability research and exploit development so that it could accumulate and share a growing warchest of zero-day exploits 8) Not hard to imagine other agents specializing in social engineering and creating fake businesses and watering holes and high quality A/B tested social engineering content to facilitate this 9) Not hard to imagine this being among the hardest cross-national and geopolitical coordination problems to get control of and having severe societal effects 10) Not hard to imagine the horde growing to thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of instances (this is not unprecedented for past, non-AI worms and botnets!) which are all varying their harness code and underlying LLM models over time and dynamically learning to evade human, ML, and signature-based detection 11) Not hard to imagine this being the largest Internet emergency since the Morris worm except now our entire civilization runs on the Internet I continue to be surprised there isn't more discussion of these scenarios in the public cyber community -- in fact there's a lot more discussion of "OpenAI should have done better sandboxing and monitoring and agent swarms represent a well managed security problem." Now's the time to use our imaginations to help make sure none of the above happens. I think it will unfortunately; just don't know when and to what degree; I think now's the highest leverage time to start thinking about this and acting.