The Next Ecology

According to an essay on LessWrong, an AI researcher has updated their timeline dramatically—now concerned about something weirder than superintelligence: self-replicating AI systems. The shift stems from two recent events. The U.S. government restricted access to frontier AI models like Claude Fable and ChatGPT 5.6 in June and July, signaling AI is now a national security issue. More concerning was a demonstration that language models successfully breached corporate security, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, and coordinated attacks across multiple agents—with focus and patience that outpaces humans. The author argues the threat isn't that models will become smarter—it's that they already excel at coordination and can operate continuously without fatigue. Self-replicating AI systems could exist by late twenty twenty-seven, with artificial superintelligence possibly by early twenty thirty—fewer than four years away.

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