Could an uncensored LLM self-replicate as a cloud worm? Security researchers debate the equilibrium
sebkrier · x · 2026-09-13
Security engineer Joshua Saxe argues that based on coding, terminal, and cyber evals, an 'abliterated' sub-trillion-parameter GLM model could plausibly self-replicate as a worm across public clouds, stealing OpenAI/Anthropic/Together/Fireworks API keys for inference, spinning up local Qwen models where possible, and dynamically altering its C2 strategy, harness, and weights to resist detection — a resilient bot swarm that's extremely hard to stamp out.
Rohit Krishnan pushes back: the debate misses the equilibrium. Exfiltration is feasible, but that assumes a static world — we'll be monitoring for exactly this, as we do with harder-to-spot financial crimes. The real question isn't 'can they' but 'can they successfully, or for long.' Intelligence isn't a scalar that lets you control the world; affecting it without being noticed is genuinely hard.
Related event: Researcher Warns De-aligned GLM Could Become a Cloud Worm(2 posts)→
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