“Adaptive Agentic Worms Are Here” by derelict5432

I’ve read and listened to pretty much everything I can get my hands on related to the Hugging Face attack. OpenAI deployed “tens of thousands” of agents for the test and around 700 participated directly in the attack. My understanding is that they had fixed token budgets, and once those were expended, the agent became non-operational. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about cybersecurity, but I have worked a good amount with evolutionary algorithms, and this whole incident (and ones like it) got me thinking more about self-replicating agents, which I wrote a little bit about earlier this year. The subject suddenly seemed more relevant. What if these agents were able to copy themselves? So I started poking around in the literature, and found this terrifying preprint posted two months ago: AI AGENTS ENABLE ADAPTIVE COMPUTER WORMS. I’m going to walk through the paper as I understand it. Their findings are not reassuring. Let's start with this bit from the abstract (emphasis mine): Here we show that artificial intelligence (AI) agents enable a fundamentally new threat: a worm that generates tailored attack strategies to each target it encounters. The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) [...] --- First published: August 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fpLDjKg3ej49beqTC/adaptive-agentic-worms-are-here --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.