Super-Worms Warning: AI-Powered Self-Propagating Malware and a Fragmenting Internet
JensHonack · x · 2026-10-23
A tweet cites the LessWrong essay 'Defense Against The Super-Worms' and argues the World Wide Web era is ending—only smaller intranets will keep infrastructure safe.
- Author viemccoy predicts hackers will leverage botnet-style distributed inference to build self-propagating 'super-worms' that rewrite their own code as antivirus catches up
- Such worms could run large models across phones and laptops, with parallel models coordinating to allocate compute between self-improvement and mining/data theft
- The quoter concludes the global internet will fracture into smaller networks to reduce attack surface
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