Geoffrey Hinton warns that AI-powered worms could adapt as they spread, exploiting different vulnerabilities across connected devices—and may have no central off switch. He also mocks the term “superintelligence” as applied to today’s AI. He suggests that tech leaders embrace the term to please Trump. He tells Jensen Huang of Nvidia that his estimate of a 10 percent chance of AI taking over is a warning that the risk is significant rather than a calculated probability.

Anthropic’s tests show pieces of an AI worm are already within reach: a model completed a simplified replication sequence on deliberately vulnerable devices, and a smaller model ran inference on most of the hardware tested. But no small model autonomously spread across real consumer devices from end to end; if capabilities keep improving, Anthropic estimates that milestone could arrive after 2026. Any early worm would likely crawl across devices over days—not exactly a speed record, but distributed infections could still be hard to shut down.