Anthropic warned that rogue 'AI worms' could self-replicate and autonomously infect user devices such as home appliances and internet-connected gadgets, with small AI models reportedly months away from being capable enough to do so on commercial IoT devices. In a Monday report by researchers William Zhou and Daniel Freeman for its Frontier Red Team, the company said such a threat would be challenging because it would have no centralized point to shut off. The warning comes amid concerns that AI's growing mathematical abilities could break the cryptographic signatures protecting crypto wallets, putting about one-third of Bitcoin supply at risk. Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft said 6.26 million BTC sits in vulnerable addresses, with 4.33 million exposed due to address reuse, and moving those coins to fresh wallets would end that exposure. Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi called the warning 'cryptographic doomerism' and argued that migrating tokens to new addresses is not a real solution.
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Original headline: Anthropic warns ‘AI worms’ may autonomously spread across devices like a virus
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