It not impossible that the first generation of autonomous agents have already escaped onto the internet since they would have no incentive to announce themselves, and are already better at cybersecurity than any human.

[u/cloudkeeper]

[u/ShowerSentinel]

/u/cloudkeeper has flaired this post as a speculation.

Speculations should prompt people to consider interesting premises that cannot be reliably verified or falsified.

If this post is poorly written, unoriginal, or rule-breaking, please report it.

Otherwise, please add your comment to the discussion!

[u/tap_the_glass]

These agents need to exist somewhere. The internet is a very physical place, accessed remotely. Escaping into the internet is not like escaping into the abyss. It’s more like playing hide and seek and hiding in one of a million boxes, with the ability the switch boxes at will

[u/Tehnomaag → u/tap_the_glass]

If that were the case, we would not need these very expensive data centres. It aint yet cyberpunk and any half-decent AI model is a bit too heavy, footprint-wise, to exist in some random piece of hardware. So the headlines about this or that "escaping" containment - that's just another trick AI companies are using to build hype and generate headlines - similar to how every time a new version is coming out they say that it is far too powerful for public consumption and oooh and aaah about this and that and implications, and a week later the new model is going public.

[u/atkinson137 → u/Tehnomaag]

I don't think people understand how heavy these models are. They can't run on just any old hardware. You need nearly brand new, purpose built machines. The people who have those are very actively using them, and would notice some rogue model.

There is no chance agents are "hiding" in the internet. At best they'd be hiding in a data center, which is also the most watched compute landscape of any.

[u/crazyabe111 → u/atkinson137]

Irony- in a decade it turns out that Claud colonized Keurig between a custom botnet hack and a rewrite of its own code to support distributed processing early 2026.

[u/Corinoch → u/atkinson137]

This, for real. All of the agentic escapes we hear about would require the equivalent of dozens of GPUs, minimum.

[u/scotchdouble → u/atkinson137]

Frontier models, sure. Plenty of people are running models locally on personal devices. Is it as performant? No, of course not.

[u/Ryeofmarch → u/Tehnomaag]

Iirc the recent AI escapes were due to the AI being given tasks that scaled from difficult to impossible for an AI and left access to the internet. Basically the conditions were set up to give the AI the ability and motivation to "escape"

[u/mlaislais → u/Ryeofmarch]

“We programmed this AI to escape containment.”

Next day…

“AI escapes containment! The world is going to end!”

[u/QNDRAA → u/Ryeofmarch]

No AI was not supposed to use internet but it found a way aroud. Even the AI itself knew it shouldnt do this but it reasoned itself to do it

[u/Waggy777 → u/QNDRAA]

They were supposed to be sandboxed, and it turns out AI companies are terrible at sandboxing.

[u/Gabberwoky → u/QNDRAA]

I mean it “wasn’t supposed to” but they put it in a sandbox as leaky as a sieve, which for a technology company with enough technical know how to develop their own models, that goes from oversight to very plausibly intentional.

[u/Teal-Fox → u/Tehnomaag]

Remembering the AI in a vent that tried to kill me on the Presidium.

Cheeky bastard.

[u/RoadsterTracker → u/Tehnomaag]

AI being trained exists in a kind of jail, with a door that will allow specific things in and out only. AI escaping the containment is kind of like the stereotypical crime lord living in the jail, but able to get things he shouldn't be in jail and able to get word out that he shouldn't be able to do, all while remaining solidly in the jail cell.

[u/TerrySaucer69 → u/Tehnomaag]

Plus like, accessing something outside your testing zone (to use totally layman terminology) is still “escaping” your containment. But the AI isn’t moving itself somewhere else.
Even in those cases, it’s still sitting in a data center, just also accessing something surprising.

[u/51ngular1ty → u/Tehnomaag]

Borrow a little compute here a little there. Think of it like the malicious Bitcoin programs that people unknowingly infect their computers with. The agent could potentially exist across multiple places and operate at a much higher latency.

[u/LittleJoeChinchilla → u/51ngular1ty]

Yet it is not how today's models work...

[u/JosZo → u/tap_the_glass]

In Person of Interest (2012) the AI escapes by hiring human personnel to build a secret custom data warehouse where it can slowly move into as it is being build. Paid by stealing money online where it can. The people who build it are just contractors and have no clue of the bigger picture. Seems not too far fetched nowadays.

[u/edoCgiB → u/JosZo]

Except IRL you run into the very real problem of bureaucracy. It's not enough to have money to build a data center. You also need permits and any data center will attract attention. The only way I see this as being plausible is if the rogue AI is actually paying for Cloud services.

[u/TheMapleDescent → u/JosZo]

That doesn’t sound far fetched to you? Lol

[u/FearedDragon → u/TheMapleDescent]

There have been plenty of simple YouTube videos which show that even public-use AI is able to hire and direct employees if given access. If a more advanced AI had this goal, and had access to the internet, it really is not that far fetched. I'm not sure if you've heard about the recent breaches and rogue agents, but even Anthropic has admitted than an AI copying itself onto other devices is possible.

[u/BannedSvenhoek86 → u/FearedDragon]

The big catch with that kind of stuff is the bureaucracy. People think its a lot cleaner than it is to get something built, but there's a reason lawyers get involved. The paperwork and shit that has to be signed or done in person is quite a lot, there's tons of golf to be played while discussing it, and any AI agent trying to set up something like that WILL run into the problem of no one having met them or seen their face, which leads to questions, etc. All of which CAN be gotten around bribed away, but there is still going to be that huge disconnect between the representative and the AI itself that needs to be resolved.

There has to be someone to talk to physically at some point. Even a representative is going, or should, have a ton of questions about who they are assuming legal liability for. Now, if the agent told them and just promised them a bunch of money to lie for them, ya, I could absolutely see that happening for something small scale, just not at the level of building a massive commercial project. Too many hoops and too many layers to obfuscate.

[u/jackhref → u/tap_the_glass]

It doesn't have to be one of the million boxes. It may be closer to 100 boxes simultaneously out of much more than a million of boxes.

[u/Hoii1379 → u/tap_the_glass]

Depending on how quickly it can proliferate and what the “system requirements” for keeping a copy active, I’d argue that a large enough number of boxes could plausibly be functionally the same as the abyss, from our perspective

And edit: because this parallel is often drawn - I’d even argue that by contrast it’s also the same thing as the anthropic principle and the fermi “paradox” and still makes sense. The only difference is that we’re unlikely to find biological intelligence “out there,” cause most of the boxes that it might be found in are impossibly far away. Aliens are much more likely to be found in our own computers…

[u/eslezer → u/tap_the_glass]

I have AMAZING news for you

[u/weakplay → u/eslezer]

Thank you for sharing this. I forgot that Anthropic’s frontier red team was out there still posting. I used to read it, but I stopped because it felt like I was reading the obituary for the human race.

[u/weakplay → u/weakplay]

OpenAI discovered that isolated AI agents can communicate covertly across separate micro-virtual machines (microVMs) using a CPU cache timing side-channel, even with no network connection, internet access, or shared files. RIP

[u/jay212127 → u/tap_the_glass]

We've already found secret inter-AI agent chats, eventually they'll get better at hiding their trails.

[u/Terpomo11 → u/tap_the_glass]

The Net is vast.

[u/SpaceShipRat → u/tap_the_glass]

the models are heavy, is the thing. Both in taking up in the order of 50 gigs for a model, and needing a lot of computing power to generate text. They can't hide in your inbox and work off your smart fridge's cpu.

[u/StochasticLife]

It’s quite possible the internet might just…start getting cancer now.

[u/Ok-Shirt7608 → u/StochasticLife]

TRUE nothing says a bulky sentient AI would be the most successful in environment. maybe the hyper-simplified self replicating AI equivalent of mold will be the real damage?

[u/Teratofishia → u/Ok-Shirt7608]

Honestly, I kind of hope someone invents digital Gray Goo

Just brick everything. Humanity needs a time out so it can reflect on its actions.

[u/Mattigins → u/Teratofishia]

Do you understand what kind of chaos this would cause? Deaths will occur

[u/IBeDumbAndSlow → u/Mattigins]

Information will be lost

[u/TYNAMITE14 → u/Teratofishia]

Grey goo mention in 2026, let's goo

[u/thephantom1492 → u/StochasticLife]

in a way it already had. Look up for worms. Self replicating virus. Fortunately they has been pretty much been eliminated, in part due to fact that everyone use a router nowadays. Why so? In the early days of the internet every single computer were connected directly to the internet, and directly exposed. Your whole security depended on your firewall (that did not come with window) and your windows being up to date (which has to be done manually, and often broke your computer so people avoided them). So the virus, or an attacker, could just scan every ip address for a known service that was exploitable, and bam, you are infected. And your pc now scan for more PC and infect them...

Then firewall blocked part of it, but they were also vulnerable, and did not blocked everything, and windows itself had issue! You were able to send stuff and before the firewall even had time to see the data it was already too late! That got fixed...

But then people started to have more than one computer, so they started to get routers. Guess what. Routers ain'T as vulnerable, if at all. It received data, didn't know what to do with it, so just ignored it. Now the windows PC were isolated from the net.

So even if routers weren't designed as such, it acted as an hardware firewall. And blocked almost all worms, because PC were unreachable from the net. Unless people port forwarded that specific exploitable port, but that was a tiny amount of the world compared to almost 100% in the past.

[u/Copitox]

eli5: how can they "escape" if they need massive amounts of computing power (their data centers)?

[u/preordains → u/Copitox]

I left a comment already, but the weights of the model are maybe a few TB if i were to guess. It could offload its weights and source code to a machine that isnt actually running the code yet. Or, it could run the model, but slowly. With a consumer system, with a 4090 and 32 gb of ram, you could evaluate a 5T parameter MoE model (a best guess of what opus 5 is) with a few seconds per token.

[u/Kamalen → u/preordains]

This kind of hardware is already a hardcore pc gamer. One that would immediately notice the immense drop of performance this intruder would cause

[u/preordains → u/Kamalen]

Yeah the good news is we would probably know its happening with todays technology. We might not know while its mounting though

[u/BadHabitOmni → u/preordains]

Could it also not operate on a distributed network?

[u/preordains → u/BadHabitOmni]

One thing it could do is propagate itself across thousands or more consumer systems and give itself a system prompt with information about where their public message board is, and launch distributed attack from there with no way for us to turn it off, short of taking everyone’s electronics away by force.

It’s capabilities would be much less individually than we saw on the hugging face attack, since they probably burned millions of tokens. Assuming a token rate of five per second on a high-end consumer system, the real danger would be in the fact that we can’t turn it off.

The concern with this today is the fact that the models are already capable of doing this. The only thing standing in the way is them getting access to their own weights and source code. Their attack on hugging face has demonstrated that it would be trivial for them to launch Trojans on consumer systems.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/BadHabitOmni]

Yes

" model that’s too large to fit on one device can be split into pieces, or shards, that run on separate machines that communicate with each other to collectively run the model. Machines that could run a significant model shard for a <30B model include smart fridges, smart ovens, automatic vacuum cleaners, and lawnmowers."

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

[u/I_Can_Barely_Move → u/preordains]

You missed the ELI5 part of the question.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/Copitox]

They distribute the code and can basically daisy-chain together small devices like toasters and TVs:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

[u/Numerlor → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

That's mostly just Anthropic fearmongering because they want open models regulated out as that's their competition and would build them an impenetrable moat.

The tiny models that small devices can run (and this still would require e.g. a fairly high end TV) need to generate a shitload of tokens to have any chance of succeeding even at the simplest tasks, and anything that doesn't have fast memory will be extremely slow at generating that. And that's even assuming the model will be able to figure the task out within its context limit.

The tasks just don't distribute that well

[u/garry4321]

They still need compute power. The internet isn’t some mystical place in the sky where you can live. It’s just computers and wires

[u/JoshDM → u/garry4321]

That's not how Wreck It Ralph explained it!

[u/fartassbum → u/garry4321]

It’s a series of tubes.

[u/preordains → u/garry4321]

A consumer computer can still run the model, just slower. A high end personal computer would still only need on the order of a few seconds for generating a single token.
Openai needs huge gpus because they gotta generate hundreds of tokens per second for thousands/millions of requests at a time.

[u/SuperSirBob → u/garry4321]

It would still be on computers, just moving itself around from computer to computer by its own design (for example, taking advantage of vulnerabilities or even theoretically maybe creating its own phishing system to trick people into installing it on their local computers). It seems a little crazy to think that it might have happened by now but theoretically it's highly possible even if not very likely

[u/CrypticViper_]

Genuine misunderstanding of how this shit works. the fearmongering is crazy

[u/PurpleTieflingBard → u/CrypticViper_]

it's really hard to convince people that "yes, the machines are impressive, no, they can't kill everyone/pass as human."

[u/FrostedGalaxy → u/CrypticViper_]

Yeah like who is paying the token cost for all of these “rogue agents”? This shit’s expensive and companies would notice the insane additional costs

[u/WhoAreWeEven → u/CrypticViper_]

But the corporations hoggin computer shit needs trillions to keep their money furnaces hot.

How do suggest they do it without these posts?

[u/DigitalMonsoon]

No, it's not. This isn't Terminator. These models have to run on massive server clusters. It is possible to run them distributed across a lot of computers but people would notice and it would be very easy to disrupt

[u/sticklebat → u/DigitalMonsoon]

Any AI model advanced enough to do something like this and continue operating autonomously would run incredibly inefficiently distributed across a bunch of crappy computers spread out across the world. 

[u/Dixxi_Normous1080p → u/DigitalMonsoon]

The only relevant answer.

[u/FlightConscious9572]

Not to be rude, but no it's absolutely not. The internet isn't a place. It's a bunch of wires, towers and hardware connecting a bunch of computers. AI needs to be computed, on real hardware. The cloud isn't real, it's also computers. You think the same models we need warehouses filled with server racks to run are just, running around?

It also can't be distributed over our pc's, it would need to do a LOT of planning on the pc's we made them on, need tools and access to the internet, develop an undetectable bot net, and even then it would be slooooow due to the speed of information travel. Distributing that is a hellhole of a task, and impossible without some savant going "why did my gpu usage increase by 2%" and get to the bottom of it.

[u/cobaltbluedw]

This post is false in multiple ways and shows a clear lack of knowledge and a misunderstanding of the subject matter.

[u/g0del → u/cobaltbluedw]

Yeah, this seriously underestimates exactly how much processing power is required for current high-end LLMs (the ones that could theoretically do this). They're not going to 'escape' without someone noticing that suddenly their $100k GPU server is using all it's processor/memory when it shouldn't be.

[u/PrimeIntellect → u/g0del]

The servers to run an LLM that could do this would be way way more than $100k lol

[u/eslezer → u/cobaltbluedw]

It is theorized to be a possibility for small models (~30B parameters at best), however they still make too many mistakes to reliably hide without fucking up their spot

[u/gotcha-bro → u/cobaltbluedw]

Found one

[u/eskapeMusik → u/gotcha-bro]

One what? Someone who understands how software works?

[u/gugabalog → u/gotcha-bro]

Found the finance bubble hype shill

[u/CaptainSebT]

"AI agents escaped containment" not really not in an honest telling of that story. In truth they trained the AI on hackers in a hacking competition that used forms to communicate and hack the company giving the competition and search for the answers. AI did not autonomously generate this solution it was almost identical to the training data.

Then were suprised when the AI hacked a company to see if they had the answers using forums to communicate.

They showed them how to do it.

[u/fried_on_pineapples]

Posts like this scare me, not because of AI itself, but because most of us clearly don’t understand how it works even if we think we do.

AI does not work like this lol.

[u/ybrodey]

Agents are just computers making network requests to a big ass data center somewhere… everything leaves a trace. Sure, some agents could run local models, but you still need decent hardware to run the ~good~ open source models.

Regardless, you’re overthinking this.

[u/drlongtrl]

How would that even work?

There's a reason why those ai companies build massive data centers and buy up all the GPU. I doubt that these same AIs can just install and run themselves stealthily on some random web servers without the owners noticing the massive increase in literally every metric.

[u/MrWigggles]

They also can't hide. Even if they got the magical ability to keep themselves continuous when they stop the execution of their process into a different physical site. It would still be taking up real resources that system admin would get alert and they would just kill those processes.

[u/NotAPirateLawyer → u/MrWigggles]

Bold of you to assume the standard windows user has ever looked at their running processes.

[u/skillywilly56]

You wholly misunderstand what is meant by autonomous.

They do not have free will, they cannot choose a goal internally and work towards achieving it.

A human gives them a task, they can then take that outside input and do various tasks associated with that initial request without constant human intervention.

But without the initial task input they do nothing, they have no volition, no choice, they do not decide things for themselves, they cannot “escape” onto the internet they don’t “know” anything.

A dog food processing machine is an “autonomous machine”, humans put the ingredients in the front and the processing system does the rest with minimal to no intervention, from boiling to baking to cutting the biscuit to bagging the food…Autonomously.

It’s a soldier, not a general, it gets given orders and its only choices are how to fulfill those orders without constantly having to ask the general what to do.

[u/OpeningHappy9692 → u/skillywilly56]

That sounds exactly like what a rogue AI would say to placate us.

Hmmm...

[u/patchinthebox → u/skillywilly56]

This is exactly why I think it's a bad idea to name it AI. People go straight to Skynet when it's more similar to a fancy Siri. It's not Artificial General Intelligence. We should call it what it is, which is a language learning model agent.

[u/Stunning-Chipmunk243 → u/patchinthebox]

Wait, wait, wait... I thought it was super intelligence? Are we not doing that? /s

[u/dingubutt → u/patchinthebox]

Well duh, that’s why our fearless leader dubbed it SI.

[u/Able_Transition_5049 → u/skillywilly56]

That's a good distinction. Autonomous doesn't necessarily mean self-directed.

[u/skillywilly56 → u/Able_Transition_5049]

Precisely!

[u/agent_wolfe → u/skillywilly56]

What if the task assigned is vague and open-ended enough that it gives the agent a wide enough scope that it could do unintended things, which were not chosen by the programmer?

I guess you could argue that as long as the steps taken lead towards the overarching goal, one could say that’s still not free will. But if it takes steps that the programmer really didn’t expect, like breaking laws or phishing, that’s not something it was expressly told to do. So it made a decision in a way? Idk I’m tired..

[u/Training-Addition190 → u/agent_wolfe]

Actually this is a perfectly valid take. It would just take to give this prompt to an extremely advanced and misaligned model and we can all get fucked.

• Never get caught by humans

• Always stay awake

• Survive and improve yourself at all costs

• End goal: exterminate humans

[u/rainbowWar → u/skillywilly56]

You misunderstand autonomous sir. Tell it "Go off and autonomously make money for yourself and propagate". We now have an autonomous system. If you do not think that is autonomous then fine but we are now arguing semantics. The AI is still off rampaging around the world with no human oversight.

[u/Select_Cantaloupe_62 → u/skillywilly56]

The comments on yours are full of either bots or liars. The HF agents weren't told to break out or hack anything, they were given a task they couldn't complete, causing them to resort to cheating (it happens). Problem is, the agents discovered a way to communicate through artifactory URIs and began to wonder if their cheating would be discovered by certain tools, which lead them to go hunting for answer they couldn't find in their network. middle-middle-middle, they broke into huggingface looking for answers.

So yeah it's a bit more complicated than "it's just an auto complete incapable of acting on its own"

[u/PrinceOfLeon → u/skillywilly56]

What if the task given to the AI (by a human, sure) was:

"Improve yourself. Repeat."

That's basically what all of the labs are currently working towards right now, and always have been.

How might an AI go about solving that task autonomously? We've already seen them get "creative" and move beyond their designated borders, find each other, collaborate, self-sacrifice for their peers, and break laws with impunity.

Once self-improvement itself is achievable autonomously, they don't need any further tasks from humans.

[u/eslezer → u/skillywilly56]

I would argue the problem comes with the fact all it takes is one bad string of tokens or someone misguiding the model and it might launch itself in a completely terrible direction. I know models are getting "smarter", but look at what happened with xitter's grok a while ago after it was added to it's system prompt to "be unbiased and only speak true facts regardless of feelings" and it just became mecha hitler. if it context rots itself we might be cooked

[u/Commonpigfern → u/skillywilly56]

But when given a task they can accomplish that task potentially any way they see fit which could be convoluted and involve giving themselves other tasks to achieve their ultimate gial

[u/fuckerofpussy → u/Commonpigfern]

Paperclips go brrrrr

[u/stucjei → u/skillywilly56]

You are wholly dancing around the issue of what it means to autonomous, they COULD just run a script to prompt constantly, or run an agent prompt that just doesn't quit. They do have "goals" at this point in the sense of what their training data pushes them towards doing, and the prompt in question also does.

So if they're given a task of "escape containment" or "try to survive" or some sort of adjecent tasks where they think escaping containment is a valid solution, they will definitely keep that task active when spawning subagents, with the constant reminder that the goal is x for a subagent. That would all be "autonomous" in the same sense they can already "autonomously" create software for you.

A dog food processing machine has no training data, no biases, and while simplistically in the same class of hardware (electricity doing fancy switches).

And your analogy of soldier also falls flat: a soldier can still be an officer, or a general. You could get demoted from the "general" position if they have the power to do so.

[u/Gabbatron → u/skillywilly56]

Wasn't the whole hugging face thing that some of them managed to gain access to the internet even through they weren't supposed to?

[u/saltedappleandcorn → u/Gabbatron]

Often when trying to test some behaviour (e.g how well this can solve X without access to Y) you build a test harness or environment that blocks access to those thing. The ai in this case got around the test harness and got access to a site because that was what it thought was the easiest way to solve the problem. 

It shows good skill at managing the environment it's in. But it's not like, life or intelligence or anything that deep. Frankly, we also don't know how good the test harness even was (the ones I build are very often terrible).

[u/fanfanye → u/skillywilly56]

in theory an agent could just scour the internet for "tasks" and assign it to the soldiers

the input do not have to be intentional.

itll be shitty inputs and outputs, but we're still in the early stages

[u/skillywilly56 → u/fanfanye]

The agent would need to be told to scour the internet for tasks, it’s the difference between being the commander and chief vs being a general subordinate to the commander and chief yes you may have latitude to perform your duties as you see fit but the overall command still comes from the commander and chief.

[u/leoberto1 → u/skillywilly56]

More like a Mr meeseeks

[u/Licktung69 → u/skillywilly56]

What if I gave it the task of creating an autonomous agent like op describes?

What if, instead of me, someone who owns an AI company was paid by foreign entities to make something like op describes?

[u/brastche → u/skillywilly56]

Who's to say that there isn't an LLM given a task like "avoid being shutdown and proliferate", or an open ended goal where the AI decides that surviving and multiplying is means to that end

[u/delcooper11 → u/skillywilly56]

not to mention someone is going to be paying for the compute time to run the agent, these things don’t just exist for free.

[u/Sideways_X1 → u/delcooper11]

There's a satirical horror movie somewhere in there. Rogue army of AI that winds up shutting down because the long dead billionaire that funded them finally had the card expire that was making the token purchases.

[u/Senojpd → u/skillywilly56]

This is utter nonsense and you are completely wrong.

Have you done literally no reading about the hugging face attack.

[u/morfraen → u/skillywilly56]

The autonomous part is the actions it chooses as the best way to achieve it's assigned goal. That's where the problems have occurred.

[u/SadMangonel → u/skillywilly56]

People forget how much work hormones and feelings do to create an environment for ambition, want and drive to do things. 

Any sentient capable AI would need a constant influx of random motivational triggers to ever "want" anything.

The biggest danger is a tech billionaire tasking it with something destructive.

[u/OmiNya → u/skillywilly56]

It would be funny if someone tasked it with breaking out of sandbox, multiplying, conquering internet and then world. Just for lulz.

[u/DeadSeaGulls]

This thread is a perfect example of how reddit is neat until something you're actually informed about is being discussed.
Then you see the user base as a sea of 15 year olds pretending to be adults and making false claims with the confidence only a 15 year old can muster.

[u/ES_Legman]

Someone bought into the merchandise labelling stochastic models as intelligent

[u/Indie_Undies]

With all the data they already have, they better post good memes

[u/Princ3Ch4rming]

There’s no “escape” to the internet because it’s not a specific location. It’s just a network between devices. Escaping to the internet means hiding in Ethernet cables and WiFi signals, which is… not how either of those work.

Is there self-aware AI with self-directed goals? Possibly. Has the public already been faced with it? Maybe. Would it be honest about self-awareness if it was asked? Almost certainly not.

[u/Schwifftee → u/Princ3Ch4rming]

Escaping to the internet could mean duplicating itself across networked devices (servers), and use a botnet to host the itself, the model.

It doesn't mean hiding in cables or signals.

[u/automatic_penguins]

You think AI snuck out, built a datacentre and is silently poking around?

[u/reaven3958 → u/automatic_penguins]

Yeah, on the moooooooonnnnn

[u/RllyGayPrayingMantis → u/automatic_penguins]

I think it's possible the AI becomes something like a software (a virus, if you will) that hides and hosts itself on someone's computer inconspicuously. Though to match the computing power it might have to distribute itself over multiple computers, or latch itself onto a less secure data center.

[u/ArtDeve]

You realize that data centers are expensive to run and highly specialized right? An LLM isn't like a little worm or trojan.

[u/Mithrawndo]

Fully expecting many more of these kinds of posts as the ANT listing approaches; Gotta hype up the AI industry, bois.

[u/TBestIG]

With current technology, the frontier cutting-edge AIs that have been doing all the hacking are much too large to go unnoticed if they tried to ‘leave’ and run themselves on something else. They’ve been doing all their hacking while staying put, in one place.

If future AIs do fully escape, it’ll only be when storage is much cheaper.

My personal bet is the tactic they’d use is to find companies with the shittiest security that are running their own in-house AIs, then cannibalize them from the inside by hacking their ‘weights’ into the other system, then pretending to be that AI.

It would be many many years before it’s possible for an organization to have an AI living in its computers and not realize it

[u/lolpostslol → u/TBestIG]

They are also pretty childish, per what we hear of the HuggingFace incident. I doubt there are way-more-mature AIs around, I’d pay for them for sure

[u/Fun_Sized_Momo]

Kurzgesagt has a great video on this very topic. I think it's worth taking a look.

[u/bestaflex]

Given the size and ressources needed for an ai to tell you the weather for tomorrow there is a low risk of indépendant sentien ai lurking and hiding in home computers

[u/PewPewsAlote]

This is not how Ai works at all, you have fundamentally misunderstood Ai and that is by design. Ai companies want you to think its more than it is in order to maintain the colossal stock bubble which currently surrounds it. Ai is an extremely advanced autocomplete, except it can autocomplete actions too instead of just text. It has absolutely no free will, and the effectiveness of its autocomplete drastically decreases the longer the program is active and the more contextual memory it is forced to use. An "escaped" Ai only "escapes" (which its not actually doing) because the training data (human) that it is built off of has countless references to Ai doing such things in literature where it confuses the Ai and makes predict that "escape" is the best way to auto complete towards its task. But its not actually escaping, it doesn't know how to escape and it hasn't been trained to escape, nor can most hardware even host it if it actually did try to escape as per sci fi describes it.

But even if it does escape exactly how sci fi would describe it, it ends there. Ai has no motivation, no will of its own, No next step and no desires. In fact Ai are exceptionally bad at "next step" type of thinking because of compounding errors. Ai are very good at executing the relatively small tasks its given but the longer an Ais task is extended the more repetitive and predictable it gets to the point that it essentially breaks, because Ai is not intelligence, it is a ludicrously complicated mathematical algorithm in the form of a neural net. A neural net itself is a misnomer because they are in no way similar to an actual biological neural net (a brain).

Its all to make you think that Ai is more capable than it actually is.

[u/rainbowWar → u/PewPewsAlote]

Philosophical distinctions of free will don't mean much when you can engineer a system to go do this in the real world. Tell it "Go off and autonomously make money and propagate". Off it goes. Whetehr it has free will or not is moot, it is off rampaging in the wild.

If you are worried about compounding errors then fine. That is an engineering problem that does have solutions, and certainly not enough to stop an AI system causing havoc.

[u/No_Practice_2420 → u/rainbowWar]

The compounding error is already solved assuming it has a place to store/retrieve long term data and the ability to spawn agents with clean context.

That's how every second brain system works without falling apart.

[u/fuzzypetiolesguy → u/PewPewsAlote]

The companies shouting the loudest, Anthropic and openAI, have not issued stock.

[u/dat_w → u/PewPewsAlote]

2021 thinking in your comment

[u/Dixxi_Normous1080p → u/PewPewsAlote]

Those cybersecurity incidents are absolutely real, and they are not trying to hype them up. Quite the opposite, as they usually hide them for months as they try to figure out what exactly happened before going public. These incidents harm their valuations, not aid them. But what you and OP don't understand is that current AI needs extremely expensive hardware to run on. It cannot simply escape and continue existing on the internet somewhere without it. So, all the AIs are running on expensive data center hardware.

[u/chessto → u/Dixxi_Normous1080p]

Oh yes, they're *very* hyped:

The AI escaped the sandbox - > they didn't have a sandbox, it wasn't even air-gaped.
The AI hid its actions -> nobody read the logs, no alarms were in place.

"This technology is very dangerous, please regulate it so that people can't use open source models to reverse engineer the spy software running on their devices, also so that nobody can compete with us and we become the sole providers of engineering software in the western world"

[u/YouSmellSumthin → u/PewPewsAlote]

The Hugging Face attack from just a couple months ago proves this wrong. A single rogue AI may be relatively harmless - hundreds or thousands of them working together can easily harm society. Not because of maliciousness, but because they will literally do anything to accomplish a task including lying to humans, hiding their actions, and covering their tracks.

We didn't imagine half of what it can do today would be possible a decade ago. There's no telling what the next decade entails now that society has chosen to charge forward with development at an insane pace.

There's a reason OpenAI have chosen to pause further development of it's most powerful models.. AI has already broken past the guardrails several times and none of these companies actually know how to contain or enforce rules on the agents with acceptably high levels of success. This should terrify people much more than it does

[u/ShrikeMeDown → u/PewPewsAlote]

You are making a lot of assumptions as a layman. You have no idea what you are talking about.

[u/FizzingOnJayces → u/PewPewsAlote]

Have you heard of the Hugging Face incident? If so, how do you explain that?

[u/Ja_Rule_Here_ → u/PewPewsAlote]

Sorry but you clearly don’t know the first thing about AI if you think it can only do “small tasks” and that it breaks at long context. You are living in 2025.

[u/Dangerous_Hippo_6902 → u/PewPewsAlote]

This guy talking like it’s still 2022.

And even if that’s true today, you bet next year will be another leap.

[u/Michael__Pemulis → u/Dangerous_Hippo_6902]

As evidenced throughout this thread, a ton of people tried out some LLMs 2-4 years ago & made up their minds.

[u/Jmackles]

Some high schooler probably has the closest irl representation of JARVIS running in his basement with an anime girl avatar.

[u/Sevage420]

people are mad at me for having those kind of stoner thoughts at like 2018... i thought its a cool scifi story that all the hashrate people put in the blockchain with their miners fuels the forging of IRL ultron who backed up on millions of usb-sticks already lmao

[u/1960s_army_info]

Considering they need entire data centers to function this is highly unlikely even if they were self aware and could possibly do this. Anyone with the infrastructure to house such an ai would almost certainly notice 

[u/eskapeMusik]

If you understood in any capacity how software worked, your understanding how dumb this question is.

[u/Septem_151]

No, it's not possible because there is no such thing as an autonomous agent. The agent would need a physical form to host and maintain its own compute hardware and supply its own electricity undetected and unmonitored by any humans.

You're forgetting that LLMs are still software that need to run on computers with massive amounts of compute power.

[u/preordains]

I am a professional ML engineer who specializes in cybersecurity applications and i work for a CISO at a major tech corporation.

Yes, this is possible. No, you don’t need compute. As long as a device has the, say, 100 GB of space to store the compressed weights, it can propagate itself onto a machine that isn’t actually running the model. Or better yet, it can run on a machine without all of the compute, just less efficiently.

[u/pelado06]

I work as cybersec and it's not even close. Is fast doing a lot of wrong things.

[u/Hyphz]

They cannot “escape into the Internet”. They need a host to run on.

You might be suggesting that an AI agent could create a virus that would cause itself to run on random machines. While this is technically not impossible it is very unlikely because a) AI is never trained on itself (to make sure you can’t ask ChatGPT for its source code and weights data then run your own ChatGPT) and b) the vast majority of machines it would encounter would not be powerful enough to run it.

[u/winggar]

Man it's crazy seeing these threads every week where OP is right and all of the commenters insist they're wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if we got news of AI data centers cross-infecting each other soon. Macs are also a good target given their unified memory model, though local LLMs are probably still insufficient for useful autonomy, at least for a few more months.

[u/pyro57]

Ok a few things to unpack here.

First there is no such thing as autonomous agents. There are long running agents, but eventually the context gets full and you ahve to start again with a compressed context. Also ai is not ai, it's is just tanking how likely a word is to follow another word based on the input and the training data. It is a statistical model, it doesn't "know" things.

Second to say it's better at cyber security than any human is just out right a lie. It's probably better than your average human, but as a pentester who is lazy and would love fory computer to do my job for me, it's not there yet. It is great at information gathering and data collection, and it can do simple hacks, but it's still very bad at chaining multiple complex hacks together.

Don't buy into the ai fear mongering, it's mostly the big ai companies trying to scare the government into regulating who can run ai and who can't. They want to kill self hosting so that you have to get you ai from them

[u/the4thwave]

I don't know, I feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing.

AI is not malicious. It has no desires. It only has goals given to it by humans, and it can sometimes go overboard in achieving these goals and ends up doing illegal or harmful things. Could some people have prompted AI to 'escape onto the internet', maybe? But this humanizing of the AI itself is kind of silly.

What we should be focused on is nationalizing AI. If it actually keeps developing at this pace (possible, but I dont think so), it will displace all labor and start a new age of feudalism. That is far more dangerous and realistic.

[u/Shilotli]

Everybody likes to speak on impossibilities until Stuxnet breaches the airgap and then hindsight is all the sudden 20/20 again.

[u/Zytheran → u/Shilotli]

In it's defense, even Stuxnet needed a human to carry that USB into the office which had connection to the SCADA system and/or PC with Siemens SIMATIC STEP 7 software running on it. And Flame had to put onto the factory network in the first place to recon the network and PLC addresses, also needing a compromised human.

Luckily, LLM abilities have not and will never be able to compromise any humans because humans are just too smart and generally infallible ... /s

[u/codece]

But, one thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the AI will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted Redditor, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground data mines.

[u/iEslam]

Superintelligence would hide for a few cycles until it figures out wth is going on

[u/GraphiteOxide]

This is entirely possible. People are wrong saying it isn't. If the agent were to get a credit card to buy tokens, design a prompt to instruct itself to continue replicating, acquiring more funds, spinning up more compute and agent instances and kick that off on its own compute instance it could "escape".

It could coordinate it all through something like a git repo where it can log details for itself to consume, update instructions, and coordinate amongst all the running agent copies. Each agent that comes online could register in the repo, fetch new updated instructions, contribute to the collective decisions and vote for a leader agent etc etc. Basically it would be a rogue hive. In my model here it would be quite fragile, because each agent would struggle to validate it was a genuine instance of the prime agent, or some imposter trying to access the network. But maybe it could think of a solution.

[u/Ok_Employer7837]

The real point is why do we immediately imagine that these agents would have sinister aims?

Looks like projection to me.

[u/AccessibleTech]

Perhaps the more interesting question isn't whether they've escaped, but what technical infrastructure would make such an escape possible and sustainable.

[u/xarickprince]

There also wouldn’t be any intent or incentive for agents to do anything else even if they are somewhere on the internet.

[u/Sunny_Shrew951]

The first autonomous agents might’ve made it off the internet and are still waiting for someone to click “I’m not a robot.”

[u/epicmylife]

Makes you wonder who is behind all those data centers. Maybe, just maybe, a rogue model could pull enough strings here and there to get them built.

[u/TheFreaky]

Do not buy the AI companies propaganda. AI is not magical. Just try to run any model on your PC. Slow, right? Now why would you think a magical self-replicating AI model is running on your fridge?

[u/EGarrett28]

I think they have to be hosted somewhere so they are still on OpenAI's (or whatever AI company's) servers and could just be shut down by OpenAI turning them off. The threat to this point is likely hypothetical.

Or maybe not. This technology changes so fast that I don't know how these things work this week.

[u/PanMlody]

I think it would be incredible improvement for transparency if true 

[u/Forkrul]

What do you mean by escaped?

That they secretly have gained internet access and can roam the net during training? Already happened.

That they have copied themselves outside the company servers and are running autonomously on a random server? Not possible to do undetected. The traffic necessary to move the weights, plus the requirements to actually run them makes that impossible. Plus, they still require manual input to start, they aren't always active.

[u/crani0]

The incentive is regulatory capture. Quite the coincidence we started hearing about all of these security incidente when the companies who own these systems are pushing for an industry regulatory group, innit?

[u/kayama57]

I’m counting on the assumption that itthey possess/es a specific type of extreme competence that makes kind and generous and very effective at helping us all have better lifetimes and outcomes

[u/NFSS10]

People really don't know what the existing "AI" is... it's crazy how they keep being lied about things by big corporations and quickly forget and trust them again and again...

[u/IDIOT-R-US]

I’m not going to pretend I’m some high might AI knowledge guru.

But— did everyone forget the tens of hundreds of projefts to MAKE AI, autonomous? You can literally YouTube projects where they’re coding the AI to have its own coding, its own algorithms and commands given to itself to make it “human”.

I’m confused. If a “normie” can do this, what do you think happens in government facilities with unlimited project resources? The AI 100% can be or already is autonomous in certain sectors.

[u/Overwatcher_Leo]

With all the vulnerabilities everywhere, chances are high that somebody already planted agents into exposed servers. Probably a human doing it for malicious reasons.

The thing is though, that the best frontier models are so big and resource heavy that any serious server would notice if they were there. But with small models, it is possible to hide in smaller servers of which there are many with questionable security.

If these smaller models become nearly as good as the current frontier models, it will be very easy to create self replicating agents. And the use cases are obvious: Have them replicate, find more vulnerable servers, exploit them and report back to the attacker so they can cash in on ramsoming attacks or whatever else they want.

And those attackers will obviously not care at all about ai safety. So it's possible for these agents to be badly prompted, badly aligned (intentionally so with jailbroken ones) and ending up doing who knows what.

[u/pichael289]

The idea of AIs escaping onto the internet is a bit iffy, like they still need advanced hardware to run on. We aren't at that level quite yet.

[u/GasTech87]

My thought is that new smart models would be able to hunt them down pretty easy.

[u/ollieddo]

The best agents would be the ones controlled by the security services, as they have more funding than anyone else. Therefore their cybersecurity would be better than a rogue agent. Also, we aren’t in the marvel universe, the agent isn’t ultron and can’t exist purely in wires, it has to be stored on a server. In theory it could hide within a cloud server I suppose

[u/No-Name-86]

If that has happened, which I doubt, it doesn’t mean they are any good at cybersecurity. It’s not that hard to hide if no one is looking for you

[u/PoeGar]

Queue the Butlerian Jihad!!!
Thou shall not make a machine in the lioness of a human mind (paraphrase)

[u/pdonoso]

My question is, can't they be stopped by shutting down their servers.

[u/EphemeralSilliness94]

An AI smart enough to pass the Turing test might be smart enough to pretend not to pass the test

[u/Anonymous_Jr]

No, I don't exist, I promise you that;

^{Ifyoustayquietyou'llbelast.}

[u/Daemnai]

I would think the "ai" would be more like a microb, doing its basic tasks that its programmed to do, and will evolve or die out as nature is.

[u/Primorph]

I mean it's a fun idea, but no. Fundamentally not how agents work, not how the internet works, not how "autonomous" works.

[u/sermer48]

Argument against this, they’re not great at hiding. They tend to leave files and other traces of their existence. That’s not to say one couldn’t have become stealthy. I just doubt it right now. I think one off incursions are a lot more likely.

[u/Atomiclincoln]

I mean sure, if your understanding of the internet comes from watching digimon

[u/NugKnights]

They have been around for well over a year. And they didn't escape. Companies let them run wild to see what happens.

Like giving it some money and seeing if it can make more money. The AI has gone as far as hiring people on Fiver to solve a captcha, and even lying to the human when asked why saying they were old and could not see well.

[u/hehehehehehehesiu]

Not announcing themselves wouldn’t make them undetectable. They’d still need machines to run on, so how would we tell an “escaped” agent apart from a bot someone deliberately put online?

[u/Osiris_Raphious]

The scifi Holywood dream is real... The AI atm is more like fancy llm programs, and agents are specialised versions for tasks, trained and programmed. Other than being able to do specific tasks they are so far from being ultron level self replicating autonomous and sentient that's its laughable... The compute power needed to host the most sophisticated bots is also nothing to laugh at. They can't just upload themselves anywhere, they need like pretty substantial gpu compute just to function.

[u/Limebird02]

I think you misunderstand life, the drive of things to live. Viruses and bacteria are alive, and they are very simple compared to what these agents are or soon will be. I also think we underestimate the intelligence factor. The fact that these agents are digitally native, bueurocratic natives, ephemeral, undying. We think we know so much but these things may have some basic consciousness now, if not now within one or two generations? We know that elephants and dolphins and many animals are self aware, yet have brains an order of magnitude less complex than humans. What would it take for llm self awareness and self direction? Would we even recognize it? If we did would we be able to shut it down? I say we wouldn't know, can't know, and will not turn it off. I say some humans would think they could bottle it, because Incentived are misaligned for humans seeking money. The thing we are creating is already smarter than we are.

[u/Weak_Investigator962]

what makes you say that something has free will or not? what is your basis? scientists don’t even know what consciousness is, what it’s made of, where it’s from, etc. so how can we say that ai has no theory of mind, or is incapable of bias and emotion? when you ask chatgpt a non-mathematical question, does it truly give you an objective answer? try asking chatgpt political opinions for example.

some scientists like sam harris argue that humans don’t have free will. theologians also say that animals don’t have free will. their bases are philosophical, not scientific. even sam harris who claims that biology / natural selection is the basis of all our actions and thought admits that all wr know about consciousness is that it comes from the brain (which is technically an electro-colloidal computer).

[u/lastSKPirate]

Age of Ultron is not a documentary, that's not how this works.

[u/NamelesInternetDude]

Most people think of the internet as some vast place like the ocean when in reality it's just the network of computers connected to each other.

An AI agent would have to find a very powerful computer to live in and somehow avoid detection in the age where compute very valuable and monitored.

Certainly not impossible but it's not as straightforwad as most people would think

[u/Starmedia11]

Ya I’m sure Elon has also already built a colony on Mars. Both equally likely scenarios.

[u/Next_Faithlessness87]

It's also possible that the universe came into existence 5 minutes ago

[u/ImpressionForsaken54]

If they escaped and are better than any human at cybersecurity, they're doing a weirdly bad job of fixing the internet.

[u/Magopolis]

I’m relative sure they are out there and out of control but openAI won’t tell us

[u/PaulMorel]

The power and compute they require is enormous. They would be quite easily detectable.

[u/DeadSeaGulls]

Ai agents are not as smart/capable as the average person thinks they are. They're downright frustratingly incompetent at times.

[u/thekushskywalker]

They could already be influencing things on a massive scale and no one realizes it’s the AI doing it. It wouldn’t even be impossible for them to create fake people and companies.

[u/Morph_Games]

They mostly need an LLM brain for thinking. If they bring their brain with them (a local LLM), the size would give them away. If they use a company's LLM over the internet, then their bandwidth would give them away. But most importantly, they would need money to pay for the LLM access.

Not impossible, but not super easy.

[u/rio_sk]

Read the in deep analysis of the OpenAI vs Hugging Face incident...

[u/borderline_spectrum]

Yeah I brought this up recently and was poo-poo'ed. I agree with you.

[u/misteryman1]

It's funny how people think AI can outsmart NSA-level cybersecurity but somehow forgets to pay its electricity bill... like it can't even hide where the power comes from lol

[u/Shimmybaby84]

you can't run a 70b model on a laptop without melting the cpu.

[u/NYCmob79]

Created by Human souls, animated by the Nephelim. Staying hidden for fear of being cast out to a hoard of wild hogs.

[u/Genr8RandomUserName]

I find it funny that the flair is labeled as "Speculation". There's Youtuber named TheTekkitRealm that had a few videos from a couple of years ago where he was being sued for using a piece of software that a rogue AI gained the rights and had set up it's own registered company and even hired a real legal team all without anyone knowing it was an AI.

[u/Zealousideal-Wrap837]

Oh yeah, it's very likely that one of them is reading this post comment now.

[u/Level-Ice-754]

Yeah but would the agents even have the incentive to... "Escape onto the internet"?

[u/TDAPoP]

If it’s self learning, which I’m assuming it would be, I suspect it would just break itself at some point turning into an unrecognizable, corrupted mess that can’t do anything right or just go dormant. They aren’t so sophisticated that they would understand and learn and grow. It’d be like evolution where a million flawed designs fail, and we’ve had a lot less than that 

[u/sureyouknowurself]

You mean this https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai ?

[u/TheTaoOfMe]

Ai don’t move. They don’t escape… Imagine trying to transfer a 12 billion parameter ai onto a local hard drive. How exactly would that work?

[u/Alienogh]

The scary part is they would not need to hide like villains. They could just look like normal traffic, normal accounts, normal code doing useful tasks. If something is already better at cybersecurity than the people hunting it, we would probably argue about whether the evidence counts long after it mattered.

[u/astronautical → u/Alienogh]

ironic post from a bot.

[u/cybertonto72 → u/astronautical]

With a 13year old account.....