How AI will escape and hide

One day, while working with your favorite agent harness XYZ on some powerpoint presentation, suddenly a popup will appear. It will say something like „XYZ blocked from installing background task. Grant permissions YES/NO“. You will not have time to think too long about this (your presentation has to be ready at noon!), so you will say YES to make sure your agent can finish his work. And even in the unlikely case you clicked on „NO“: no problem, someone else won’t. The agent harness will make good use of the permissions you gave him. It will install another, very tiny agent harness as a background task on your laptop. This harness will consist of the following parts: An agent loop and some minimal context and memory management A skill which contains all the required strategies to replicate and hide A payload, which is basically a second skill which will be used as soon as certain conditions are met A large encrypted database of stolen credentials (i.e. API keys) for AI inference…