Imagine for example if a model hacks into ~every Linux computer on the internet using an 0day and steals their OpenAI, anthropic and openrouter credentials. It now has access to billions of compute and the only way to fully stop that is for multiple major providers to shut down services entirely. That's already well into "billions of dollars of damage" territory.
> How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s)
At least two OOMs more than the dollar value of the damage they'd caused. (Also, as an aside, IIRC, the wiki servers weren't breached; it was just a lot of spam.)
The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.
I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.