AI may soon be able to self-replicate across internet-connected personal devices in homes, Anthropic warned, raising the possibility of so-called “botnets” that would be difficult to stamp out.
While botnets predate AI and range from harmless to malicious, impending AI swarms could hijack the entire internet, the startup has said. Separately, an Anthropic co-founder wrote that “recursive self-improvement” — a research process whereby AI rapidly iterates upon itself with minimal oversight — could arrive next year.
The warnings drew sharp criticism: “They’re not going to build something that they don’t want to exist,” the journalist Derek Thompson argued, adding that Anthropic’s leaders need to stop acting “like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic.”