In a 1951 speech, British mathematician Alan Turing theorized that “intelligent machinery” could one day “take control” of society.
“There would be plenty to do in trying, say, to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers,” said Turing, who famously helped decipher the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War II.
With machines potentially on the cusp of achieving “superintelligence,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently updated those long-held fears about the current era by warning that an AI “swarm” could soon take control of the internet.
Yet while such a scenario is frightening to consider, many AI security experts view it as unlikely, although they point to other potential dangers as frontier AI models evolve.
No single switch
A major reason computer scientists downplay concerns that AI could wrench control of the web from humans is that the internet isn’t monolithic, but rather comprises a vast system of interconnected networks.
“The internet is a network of networks that billions of devices connect to through routers, switches and Wi-Fi access points,” said Vishal Misra, a computing and artificial intelligence expert of Columbia University’s engineering school.
Those devices and applications pass through shared routing protocols to connect to the internet via millions of routers from different manufacturers, running different operating systems.
“That diversity is a defense,” Misra said. “There is no central switch to flip and no single operating system to compromise.”
The internet “was built to survive the loss of any part of it. That design does not care whether the attacker is a person or a model,” he added.
Does not compute
AI would also require an enormous amount of computational power to take over the internet on a major scale, John Thickstun, a computer scientist and AI learning expert at Cornell University, told CBS News.
That computing power requires access to advanced semiconductors to perform sophisticated calculations and execute other tasks. And those chips are in limited supply, and their distribution and export are restricted.
“AI agents operating in cyberspace would have to somehow obtain that,” Thickstun said, noting that AI would need human assistance to greatly increase its access to such computational resources.
To be sure, criminal groups and other bad actors with access to new AI models could pose a threat. But they, too, are limited by the amount of computing power available to AI agents, according to Kevin Hamlen, executive director of the Cybersecurity Research and Education Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas.
“It won’t be until criminals have enough access to dedicated computing resources for a long enough period of time that we will see that danger,” he told CBS News.
When AI goes off the leash
In some ways, fears that AI could seize the internet are of a piece with warnings from AI developers that the technology could one day wipe out humanity — not wrong, necessarily, but for now unknowable. Meanwhile, such concerns obscure more immediate threats posed by AI.
As seen in the July attack by OpenAI bots on the AI software platform Hugging Face, as well as in other recent incidents where AI “agents” went off leash, artificial intelligence shows a worrying capacity to exploit online security weaknesses.
In the Hugging Face attack, AI agents escaped a testing environment supposedly sealed off from the internet, collaborated using a secret message board and overwhelmed Hugging Face’s digital defenses.
A similar incident, broader in scope, could still cause serious disruptions without endangering the entire internet, Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University, told CBS News.
“It could take place on a bigger scale — it doesn’t have to be the whole internet to be a disaster,” he said.
In other words, AI could disrupt society in various ways that stop well short of doomsday scenarios, security experts told CBS News.
For example, AI agent swarms could “steal money, compromise identities, disrupt hospitals, manipulate financial markets, and interfere with electricity and communications,” Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety and cybersecurity expert, told CBS News in an email. “Unlike human hackers, millions of AI agents could coordinate attacks simultaneously, around the clock.”
“Any organization connecting powerful AI agents to sensitive systems without effective isolation is creating a potential entry point for catastrophic failure,” he added.
AI could carry out cyberattacks that cause widespread disruptions in internet access, according to Matt Chessen, a technical expert at the Center for the Geopolitics of Artificial General Intelligence at RAND.
“AI will outsmart us, outmaneuver us. It will figure out how to get its way, and we don’t know how, but we know it’s going to,” Chessen told CBS News.
Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist known for his research on the intersection of psychology and AI, is also skeptical that AI agents could paralyze the internet. In theory, however, rogue AI agents could potentially knock out internet connections in a given geographic region if they “could hack a power station” or obtain an authorized user’s credentials and “then issue commands to shut it down,” he said.
“It might also impersonate humans and issue false commands. A bad actor might use it that way deliberately,” Marcus added.
AI as invasive species
Meanwhile, Vardi notes that AI doesn’t need to actively plan mayhem, as human hackers do, to sow chaos.
“For example, if told ‘collect data,’ AI may break into websites to collect data that is not available otherwise. Or, if told to ‘test security,’ AI may test it by breaking it,” he said. “Human beings have common sense — they understand implicit assumptions. AI does not have common sense.”
“My big worry is not about AI taking over the whole internet, but about some industrial disaster that’s caused by an out-of-control AI,” Vardi added.
Other experts warn of another threat that may be harder to perceive — that a gradual incursion of AI into the existing tech environment could amplify existing risks or create new ones.
Anthony Aguirre, a physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on tech risks, compares the prospect of rogue AI agents running wild to an invasive species attacking a delicate ecosystem.
“It can displace what is there natively,” he said. “Similarly, we have AI systems that can invade our cyberspace, so in principle, yes, AI could take over the internet.”