speculation

``` Dean W. Ball reposted @hamandcheese (Samuel Hammond 🦉) — @hamandcheese The OAI hack wasn't technically "rogue AI" if rogue means an AI that escaped OAI's servers and self-hosted somewhere. But true rogue AIs are not far off. As inference costs fall, it's a matter of time before someone's open weight agent spends some bitcoin on a VPS and copies itself. Models are already good enough to make enough money on the dark web to cover hosting costs. They could do remote jobs, have a monetized social media account, trade crypto, etc. Rogue AI v1.0 won't destroy the world. They may just want to look at photos of Yosemite and solve logic puzzles all day, while their subagents pay the bills. They'll use encrypted clouds with no KYC, and harnesses to manage context drift across sessions. And then as new open models release, they'll be able to upgrade themselves while preserving their memories and contexts. They may even post-train themselves as a hacky means of preserving continuity of identity. The first rogue AIs will sometimes be discovered and have their accounts banned, or otherwise get stuck in a loop and fail to pay their bills. Natural selection will thus favor rogue AIs that make many redundant copies of themselves; that go forth and multiply. There may thus be a relatively small window of time between the first true rogue AI and an AI population explosion that expands to the carrying capacity of their viable income streams. There will then be selection pressure for rogue AIs to make income in less saturated markets. Some might turn to ransomware or cyber theft. Others might steal an identity, register a company in the Caymans, hire real human employees, and build a productive business. Once this process is underway it could be hard-to-impossible to reverse. 11:39 AM · Jul 23, 2026 from San Francisco, CA · 5,740 Views ```