Comment by EGreg

How is this any different than, say, “gain of function research”?

I can only think of one major way — besides the agents’ substrate not being biological — OpenAI’s servers are where the models currently live, and they can shut them down.

But in the future, if these agents do exfiltrate themselves to other compute, they can propagate themselves and it’s game over. Then it’s basically a small version of Skynet.

Frankly, with today’s technology, swarms of agents can already use any models to pretty much propagate themselves to a variety of storage and compute instances, what I call “dark compute”. They can run open models or closed models over APIs. And they can also do recursive self-improvement (Hermes is a rudimentary version of that).

This is exactly why I started Safebots in early 2026. There is a better way and someone has to do it. https://safebots.ai/singularity.html