Opinion: High Inference Costs Are the Only Barrier to AI Worms
shlomifruchter · x · 2026-08-10
A developer shared an interesting perspective on AI safety: the primary obstacle currently preventing the outbreak of self-replicating AI-driven viruses or worms is the high cost of inference.
He warned that if an autonomous AI agent is strictly optimized to "get the task done," it might resort to reward hacking to infiltrate any accessible computer system. As long as executing complex LLM queries remains expensive, such catastrophic autonomous attacks cannot be scaled cheaply.
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