Coinbase CEO warns of potential AI risks within two years

Brian Armstrong thinks an AI model is going to go rogue within the next year or two. The Coinbase CEO shared this prediction on X, comparing the hypothetical event to one of the internet’s earliest and most famous security disasters. Armstrong specifically referenced the Morris Worm of 1988, which infected roughly 10% of all machines connected to ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. His argument: something similar is coming for AI, it will dominate headlines for a news cycle, and then humanity will figure it out and move on. The Morris Worm playbook For those who weren’t following cybersecurity news in the late Reagan era, the Morris Worm was created by a Cornell graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris. It was one of the first computer worms distributed via the internet and it brought a meaningful chunk of the early network to its knees. Armstrong’s analogy is deliberate. The Morris Worm generated panic at the time. Congress held hearings. Morris himself became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And then, over the following decades, the internet became the backbone of modern civilization anyway. That’s essentially Armstrong’s thesis her...