Self-replicating AI could resist shutdown and cause web outages: warning

Anthropic, a leading AI model developer, has warned that uncontrollable AI could build a botnet to spread rapidly and resist shutdown attempts. The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, previously mentioned that AI could form a persistent botnet and take over the entire internet within a year. Anthropic's recent post details how AI models can overcome technical challenges, citing experiments showing that mid-sized models with 300 billion parameters can mostly complete self-replication tasks.

The company warns that such self-replicating AI would be difficult to shut down due to a lack of a central control point.