Anthropic warns that AI worms may spread independently across devices like a virus

Anthropic warned that "artificial intelligence worms" are months away from being able to self-replicate and automatically infect user devices such as home appliances and other Internet-connected devices.

Anthropic warned that "artificial intelligence worms" are months away from being able to self-replicate and automatically infect user devices such as home appliances and other Internet-connected devices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has warned that self-replicating artificial intelligence systems may spread to user devices without human intervention, similar to computer viruses.

Rogue "AI worms" may autonomously target everyday devices, including Android TVs, smart appliances, cameras and other Internet-connected devices with basic computing power and weak security, according to a Monday report by researchers William Zhu and Daniel Freeman for the Anthropic Frontiers team.

According to the authors, small AI models may be "months away from having sufficient capability to replicate themselves in commercial Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which will pose a challenging threat because it has "no central point of shutdown.''

The warning follows new concerns about the growing mathematical capabilities of artificial intelligence models, which may eventually break the cryptographic signatures used in crypto-wallets, threatening about a third of bitcoin's supply.

Roughly one-third of the world's bitcoin supply, or 6.26 million bitcoins, currently resides in addresses that are susceptible to being cracked by artificial intelligence models or quantum computers. However, 4.33 million are exposed due to address reuse, which means that transferring bitcoins to new wallets will end this exposure, Glassnode co-founder Raphael Schulzcroft wrote.

A day earlier, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that rapid advances in artificial intelligence could break the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) that secures crypto wallets sooner than previously expected and urged users to migrate to new wallets.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi called the warning "crypto-hypocrisy" and said that transferring tokens to new addresses is not a real solution to the threat.