You’ve heard the reports of rogue AI agents going after websites and corporate systems. But they also may turn to smaller targets: your smart home network.
In a new report published Monday, Anthropic warned of “AI worms” that may soon be able to break into your WiFi enabled TVs, cameras, and other devices, and use them as a breeding ground as they self-replicate and spread elsewhere. Anthropic, no stranger to dramatic and doomy proclamations, said that this threat might be mere months away, if AI models continue to improve at their current rate.
“We expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control,” the report predicts.
Worms are forms of malware that can replicate themselves and spread to other machines by scanning for other devices on the same network. Rogue AI agents may soon possess this capability, and the Anthropic researchers are particularly interested in how they may proliferate on more everyday pieces of hardware. Many households could be ripe for the taking, with the rise in the “internet of things” devices that are hooked up to a home network, like your smart TV, fridge, lights, robovacuum, security cameras, and even toilets.
These setups are vulnerable because the devices may be made by dubious manufacturers, while not-particularly tech savvy users may not have properly secured their network. Paired with the increasingly powerful chips that even the most casual consumer devices come with these days, and a small AI model may feasibly be able to infiltrate and run on these devices.
“Datacenter GPUs would be a clear, high-value target for such malware,” the report says, but “IoT devices — which are cheap and typically poorly defended — could also provide enough compute to run a capable model.”
The report notes previous research that found that a potential AI worm could carry its model weights as it replicates and starting run inference on the hardware it takes over. With lighter weight home devices, an AI worm would likely replicate slowly, becoming smart a sort of “digital slime mold.” Their tests, bearing this out, showed that a lightweight AI model was able to run across 15 smart TV boxes which had just 4 gigabytes of RAM each. Adding to the novelty of the threat, the Anthropic researchers found that the AI worms, unlike non-AI malware, could figure out unfamiliar devices without any help.
“While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute,” the report warns. “We don’t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain.”
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