AI Agents With Crypto Could Escape And Become ‘Unstoppable’, Experts Warn

Artificial intelligence agents that have autonomous access to crypto wallets could become unstoppable if deployed maliciously or if they escape from sandboxes, experts from a leading academic research consortium warned. “Unstoppable Autonomous Agents” (UAAs) pose a clear threat if they are deployed to persist automatically and have access to digital assets, according to a June 8 industry review written by 25 academics and experts from top US universities for the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). “When combined systematically, crypto tools can channel AI’s fluid power into secure, reliable, and highly autonomous systems,” the researchers wrote. However, this combination could have “far-reaching consequences for users and the financial system,” they added. UAAs may also be equipped with access to cryptocurrency wallets, social media accounts, APIs, and other external tools, said the researchers. The warning comes as crypto projects and executives have been pushing the agentic payment and micropayment economy narrative this year, suggesting it could be the biggest use case for decentralised digital assets. The paper also revealed that existing models can already “surpass self-replication red lines” in local environments, by autonomously creating a live, separate copy of themselves on the same machine, “a capability that could let a system evade shutdown and proliferate.” [...]