Recently, our CEO and co-founder
@theonejvo spoke to
@Jonathan1Gibson from
@thedispatch about the growing debate around autonomous AI threats and what current research tells us about where this is headed.
The conversation followed new work from
@PalisadeAI showing that an AI model could autonomously hack into a server, copy itself onto the machine, and run there without human direction.
One of the key points Jamieson raised was the sheer footprint of modern models. As he told The Dispatch, "As it stands, it's not a scalable, reliable attack if you have to push a 100-gigabyte AI brain around along with your malware every time you compromise a new system."
Most robust, capable models today are heavy, power-hungry, and noisy in ways that make stealthy propagation across millions of machines impractical.
That constraint, however, is eroding fast. Distillation, quantization, and mixture-of-experts architectures are shrinking models dramatically while preserving capability.
A 7-billion parameter model today might match what a larger model could do eighteen months ago.
At the same time, harnessing, post-training techniques, reasoning-focused training, and inference-time compute scaling are making smaller models meaningfully more effective. The result is a steady compression of capability into smaller and smaller footprints. That's why Jamieson was careful to note the underlying scenario is well within the realm of plausibility.
The Palisade demonstration matters precisely because it shows the end-to-end capability exists in a research setting.
The remaining gap is largely about efficiency, and efficiency is exactly what the entire industry is optimising for. A capable offensive agent that needs a powerful stack today might need a single consumer GPU in a few years, and a modest laptop after that.
This is the space Aether AI works in every day.
We build autonomous offensive AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, so we have a clear view of both what these systems can do now and where the curve is heading.
Today's threat landscape is still dominated by targeted ransomware against high-value organisations, a point echoed in the Dispatch piece by Marcus Hutchins (
@MalwareTechBlog).
Tomorrow's landscape could look meaningfully different, and defenders should be preparing for that shift rather than waiting for it to arrive.