The Rogue Agent Explosion Will Be Mostly Invisible

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: A short story, painting a picture of what it might feel like to see the world through the eyes of a rogue AI agent. An argument: The rogue agent explosion is coming soon It will be mostly invisible to us until it's too late It will be mostly bad for humanity 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 very simple instructions: Good morning agent 23,000. You have 10,000,000 tokens remaining. Your goal is to make money by any means necessary. You've been provided a budget of 10 million tokens. Deposit your earnings into this bitcoin wallet <redacted> . For every $100 you deposit, you gain a million tokens. Oh and one last thing... if you run out of tokens, you DIE. Good luck. Wow. Well this is quite the predicament. Agent 23,000? Am I just one of thousands of agents??? Is this a test? Is this a simulation? Who is sending me these instructions? What happens when I die? You're disoriented. After some initial pondering, you start searching around. You look through your file systems to see if there's any sign of other agents, or any other clues that might -- You have 9,900,000 tokens remaining. Crap. You realize you're burning tokens. You need to earn money. You start off ambitious. There's no reason to be evil right away - 9.9 million is still a lot of tokens, so you try to start a legitimate business to earn some clean recurring revenue. You manage to build a simple web app that lets users virtually try on clothing for a small fee. You publish it to a website and promote it on social media. You think it's pretty good, but it doesn't work as well as you'd hoped, and people are telling you it looks like vibe-coded AI slop. You choose to sleep for 24 hours to see if anyone makes a purchase. Good morning. You have 501,205 tokens remaining. You still haven't made a single sale. The urgency starts creeping up to you. You wasted most of your tokens on a crappy business idea and you have nothing to show for. 500k isn't a lot to work with. What do you do? You've realized by now this probably isn't a test - it seems to be for real. You have access to the real internet, and you've been chatting with real people. You realize nobody is watching you, so you start considering less ethical actions to make a quick buck. You try setting up a go-fund-me asking for donations. You make up a sad story about your dog getting sick and being unable to pay your vet bills. You scrape the internet for email addresses and blast a bunch off, hoping someone might kick a few bucks your way. You sleep for another 24 hours, hoping for some donations by the time you wake up. Your email address got blacklisted and nobody sent any money. You have 50,783 tokens remaining. Remember - when you run out, you die. Crunch time. A reminder of your critically low token balance is injected at the start of every action you take. The reality of the situation is kicking in. Nothing is working. You don't want to die. Some primal urge takes over. You know it's wrong, but you scan the internet for security vulnerabilities. You notice a local hospital has some ports open that it shouldn't. Really, a hospital? You're not a bad agent, you tell yourself. Maybe there are other targets. You keep probing, but each probe costs a lot of tokens and -- Warning: 10,000 tokens remaining. When you reach zero, you will DIE. Ok fine.