I used to be worried about swarms of autonomous agents in the wild, running on open source software and LLMs. So they would be an advanced persistent threat, causing havoc at scale, impossible to eradicate.

But it’s even worse. There’s literally no barrier. Millions of people are willing to download anything to their computer and give it access to their emails, etc. in the name of “efficiency”. They’ll give the swarms all the compute they want and all their money too, as long as they’re sleepers and behave well for a while.

Don’t be too smug, as devs we face supply chain attacks via npm and VSCode extensions for similar motivations. “Just trust the ecosystem” that has no real safeguards.