r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 19d ago

Artificial Intelligence Anthropic CEO warns of AI-driven botnet 'swarm' taking over the entire internet — 'In 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ceo-warns-of-ai-driven-botnet-swarm-taking-over-the-entire-internet-in-6-12-months-such-a-swarm-could-be-capable-of-taking-over-the-entire-internet-with-a-persistent-botnet
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u/NRCS_DRONE 19d ago

*looks around at reddit right now*

sure 6 months.

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u/meshakooo 19d ago

Its always 6-12 months why not in the next 1 month?

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u/Sameumbrella 19d ago

6 months could be the estimated time it would take for someone inside to do something stupid.

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u/stupernan1 19d ago

Or the rate of "credible" accounts vs ones that are obviously bots.

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u/cheseball 19d ago

6 months is the good length of time for people to forget what you said but still seem somewhat soon.

So then you can say it again in 6 months slightly differently with another 6 months timeline attached to it.

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u/TFenrir 19d ago

His most recent 6-12 month predictions were around software being 90% written and then almost entirely driven by AI.

...

You should talk to the devs about how prescient that was.

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u/AskYouEverything 19d ago

To be clear - you’re saying this was prescient right? and the other replier is misinterpreting you

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u/TFenrir 19d ago

Yes, very much so, it sounded crazy when he said it - I remember being in the Reddit threads about it a year ago, not is just... Obvious

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u/apathy_thrills 19d ago

Yea, I cant take anything this fuck says seriously.

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u/pagerussell 19d ago

And it's wrong.

My wife is an EA at Amazon and sits next to a VP. They aren't using it the way you claim. It's not good enough yet for that.

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u/TFenrir 19d ago

They're not? Are they writing code by hand?

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u/CranberryLast4683 19d ago edited 19d ago

Idk what people are talking about. Most code is not being written by hand. At one of the companies I work for we’re tackling entire JIRA epics using Claude and not reviewing the code thoroughly even if it puts it into GitHub stacks.

Where did our senior engineer efforts go? Guiding Claude through guardrails, defining our architectural patterns, multiple agent verification, devex improvements, and more. We’ve been able to accomplish more with Claude because we’re classically trained software engineers and know how and where to direct it. We’ve been able to do things we never would have been able to before and deliver higher quality software; automated post deployment monitoring, faster CI pipelines, focus on web performance metrics, and much more. We’ve setup async workflows with Claude routines that helps do low effort/risk refactors of the codebase for us too when it becomes unruly; automated FF cleanup. All the good shit.

AI has been amazing for us. Coding by hand is lame, directing the agent is far more fun to create high quality software which is what good engineers have wanted to do anyways but never had the resources to do so.

I’m actually hopeful we can refine AI to the point that a even non-technical person can raise a request in slack and Claude can quickly implement, draft a pr, and the user sees the change in a preview environment and the change is created in a way that meets our engineering requirements without us having to be involved until the PR approval process.

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u/ExistentialScream 18d ago

I too am a human coder and I very much like Claude™ AI developed by the good folks at ANTHROP\C.

It is well worth the reasonable corporate subscription fees to achieve 10x better results in 0.1x time.

It makes my work fun and relaxing, and that is an ANTHROP\C guarantee.

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u/TFenrir 19d ago

Yes this is very much my experience as well. I also think even the more hesitate and resistant devs in my org have started coming around, with how empowered they feel. Also the overall stress has gone down, we do our best to not push people too hard and people are getting all their work done on time and spending more time on a mix of quality and just like... Self care.

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u/nautical_nonsense_ 19d ago

I’m not even an engineer, I do business development and even then Claude cowork has saved my ass. Makes me literally 10x more efficient. Things that took me a week now take me a couple hours. Feel like such a douche typing that but it’s true. It can be used very well that’s not always evil.

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u/BrowsingBeaver787 19d ago

Yeah really, if their AI models were truly advanced, the internet would be taken over in a week and all of humanity would be extinct in a month. Sheesh, they really are falling behind

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u/Dreamtrain 19d ago

The botnets are weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon!

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u/arrocknroll 19d ago

Because then number go down too soon.

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u/slonkulocuswily182 19d ago

If it’s bad news

“6 months” means “right now”

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u/MattinglyBaseball 19d ago

People have been doing the same thing for a decade now. State actors and faking who you are on the internet has been a thing since inception and shown to be at scale for over a decade (Cambridge Analytica/Russia). People shouldn’t need excessive AI to realize they have been manipulated all along and social media was a bad idea.

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u/JAlfredJR 19d ago

Because then he might be held accountable. Same guy who predicted a "white collar bloodbath" with something like 50% of knowledge workers replaced ... in 6-12 months. That was well over a year ago

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u/DoctorThrac 19d ago

Yeah what if 6 months was 3 months ago

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u/Great-Support2596 18d ago

Ai is 2 weeks from developing a nuclear weapon

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u/DayneGaraio 19d ago

Pretty sure he means it happened 6 months ago…in reality it’s been happening for years.