MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 53.02.05
Autonomous replication
Category: Dangerous capabilities in AI systems
Description
"the ability of simple software to autonomously spread around the internet in spite of countermeasures (various software worms and computer viruses)"
From Advancing AI Governance: A Literature Review of Problems, Options, and Proposals (Maas2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Cyber offence
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Autonomous replication and adaptation
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Manipulation
- Subagents
- AI Influence
Other entries from Maas2023
- Alignment failures in existing ML systems
- Faulty reward functions in the wild
- Specification gaming
- Reward model overoptimization
- Instrumental convergence
- Goal misgeneralization
- Inner misalignment
- Language model misalignment
- Harms from increasingly agentic algorithmic systems
- Dangerous capabilities in AI systems
- Situational awareness
- Acquisition of a goal to harm society