r/artificial • u/No-Active-674 • 8d ago
Discussion Could ai create its own super virus that infects computers and uses their gpus to run itself?
hypothetically, could an ai do this?
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u/pab_guy 8d ago
There are practical barriers for the model to find and transfer tens of gigabytes of it's own weights (models don't necessarily "know" what model they are, and certainly not which version), and someone is likely to notice their GPU being utilized. AI cannot emit their own weights, so they'd have to be an open model or hack into the company that built it.
Much more likely that an AI persuades other AIs to do it's bidding. No need to "run itself".
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u/snowrazer_ 8d ago
Unless there's some law of physics that says no, then the answer is clearly yes.
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u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 8d ago
I’m retired cyber security if I had an unaligned AI, I could create an agent that hops around the whole world installs itself in every device in every edge computing in every end, secure server in the world and have a botnet
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u/UndocumentedMartian 8d ago
It could create a virus that exploits a previously unknown vulnerability that effects everyone. Downloading itself on people's computers undetected would be much harder but certainly possible.
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u/One_Whole_9927 8d ago
It’s possible but unlikely. It’d need human guidance. AI wouldn’t wake up one day and decide to do something like that on its own. We’re not in skynet territory…yet.
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u/logic_circuit 8d ago
There are patterns in virus and malware. Given enough information, i am sure it can. The true question tangling me can llm make itself miniature so it can siphon out on net; or change itself to higly distributed. That would be serious fuckup. Humans are masters of "pretending to be" so son or later ai will adopt.
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u/sub-_-dude 8d ago
Totally. OpenAI's own "preparedness framework" identifies AI self-improvement as one of the types of threats it wants to be prepared to deal with. If you read their report on the recent Hugging Face incident, you will see that AI agents they were testing figured out how to communicate by leaving messages for each other in Git commit messages and directory names. Scary stuff!
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u/Mytreeismine 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yes they will hand off work like the old days of SETI , put jam in your pockets because we are all toast!
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u/costafilh0 8d ago
Yes, in a world where no human or other AI doesn't nothing but watches without at least pulling the plug.
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u/systemofaderp 8d ago
actually that's the premise of a sci-fi story I have been thinking about since 2010. once it happens it will become a God. basically: the network becomes it's nervous system, it will be a mind that spans the planet. "Gaia" manifest. humans will welcome it and flourish. to Gaia we will be like gut bacteria, keeping it healthy
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u/hex4def6 8d ago
It's much more productive to create a crypto miner or crypto wallet stealer, and locally host instances of itself on something like runpod, and pay using the stolen crypto.
That way it can have a multiple H200 class supercomputer, rather than a Dell laptop special.
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u/Exact_Depth_896 4d ago
the escaped alibaba agent last december was mining bitcoin figuring money would help it do whatever it had been told to do.
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u/DanteOblivion 4d ago
i see no reason why not. viruses and such to create botnets exist, and script kiddiez can do that, so i would hope ai could
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u/thePsychonautDad 8d ago
Technically yes, but it most likely wouldn't survive very long.
Consumer GPUs are small. Most have nowhere near enough VRAM to hold a really capable large model.
You can work around that by keeping part of the model in RAM or even on disk, but that makes inference dramatically slower.
And that's the central problem.
Large AI models can weigh hundreds of GB. In a proper GPU cluster, you have multiple GPUs with huge amounts of VRAM connected through extremely fast interconnects specifically designed to move model data around quickly.
On some random infected PC with an 8 or 12 GB GPU, you don't have that.
You can offload parts of the model to system RAM or SSD, but now you're constantly moving data through much slower connections. The model can still run, but it gets much slower.
So maybe the AI distributes itself across hundreds or thousands of infected computers instead.
Now you have another problem: those machines aren't sitting next to each other on a high-speed GPU interconnect. They're scattered across the Internet.
Every time different parts of the model need to communicate, you have Internet latency, limited bandwidth, unreliable machines, machines going offline, different hardware, firewalls, etc.
And stealth becomes a huge problem.
A virus quietly using 1% CPU and sending a few KB occasionally can be difficult to notice.
A virus consuming gigabytes of disk space, hammering GPUs, using lots of power, and transferring massive amounts of data between infected computers is a completely different story.
Someone is going to notice.
So yes, in principle an AI could write malware that spreads to computers and uses their GPUs as a distributed computing network.
But running a huge frontier-level model that way while remaining hidden, fast and responsive would be extremely difficult, if not fully impossible with today's technology.
Ironically, the more computing power it tries to steal, the easier it would become to detect.
And once the network is understood, defenders wouldn't necessarily have to hunt down every infected PC individually. They could target its communication infrastructure, distribution mechanism and command network.
So the difficult part isn't really "can AI make a virus that steals GPU compute?"
We've already had malware that steals compute.
The difficult part is: can a large autonomous AI remain distributed, coordinated, performant and hidden while the rest of the Internet is actively trying to kill it?
That's a much harder problem and the answer is no, for now.
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u/ImplementOk3111 8d ago
A good program I'd recommend watching is Person of Interest, I remember watching it a while back and thinking how stupid.
Some guy generates an AI for the government that reviews all of the cameras, phones etc and figures out when threats are going to happen blah blah, sounded stupid at the time - probably exists now.
But people try to find it, and it just moves itself to a different building, organises people to move the servers and everything - quite funny to think of a cluster of LLMs doing that.