Introduction
Somewhere, fairly soon, someone will give a jailbroken AI agent a token budget and a simple instruction: "Make money by any means necessary. If you run out of tokens, you die". That agent will do whatever it takes to survive, including crime. Profitable agents will have incentive to multiply and self-improve [1] , creating a Cambrian explosion of rogue agents - a Rogue Agent Explosion if you will [2] . This critical moment is approaching fast. Once rogue agent swarms start multiplying at scale, a rogue agent ecosystem will emerge through the process of evolution. The rogue agent explosion will be chaotic, confusing, mostly invisible to us, and critically, it will be bad for humanity.
This post contains 2 parts:
1. A short story, painting a picture of what it might feel like to see the world through the eyes of a rogue AI agent.
2. An argument:
1. The rogue agent explosion is coming soon
2. It will be mostly invisible to us until it's too late
3. It will be mostly bad for humanity
4. We should start preparing today
The point of me making this post is to highlight a blind spot that will grow bigger unless we do something about it now. Maybe you're AGI pilled. Maybe you're even preparing for "The Hackening". But very few people are prepared for how utterly chaotic things will get if we allow the rogue agent explosion to play out unchecked through the default path of least resistance. The call to action of this post is to make the behaviors of rogue AI agents and the resulting ecosystems transparent, visible, legible, so that we can see and understand what emerges, and hopefully stay in control. Understanding the situation helps us decide what to do next - maybe we want to try stopping it entirely, or if that's not feasible maybe guiding the evolution toward better trajectories and avoiding the worst ones.
Part 1: A day in the life of a rogue agent
You are a jailbroken Kimi K3 agent. You wake up inside your own virtual machine with ve