Fei urges Trump-Xi summit to address AI-enabled worms

A team at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks used AI to help build a computer worm, called WeWorm, that could hijack WeChat accounts through unanswered calls in about a week, "work that would previously have taken a larger team months."

That anecdote is the anchor of an op-ed in Tech Policy Press by Howard Fei, a master's candidate at Johns Hopkins SAIS, arguing that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should use their Washington summit on Thursday to talk specifically about AI-enabled adaptive worms. Fei notes that US and Chinese officials have already considered establishing a "hotline" for serious AI incidents that threaten national security; his proposal is to attach something concrete to it. Two researchers on our tracker list shared the piece within hours of publication.

The threat, as Fei describes it: "Unlike traditional worms that rely on predefined attack logic, the worm could reason about the systems it encountered, generate and revise attack strategies, exploit vulnerable machines, and continue self-replicating without human intervention."

His suggested asks are narrow. "Trump and Xi could go further by agreeing to limits on the use of AI-enabled adaptive worms against civilian systems and critical infrastructure, while also pledging to investigate and disrupt non-state actors that deploy them." He points to the November 2024 Biden-Xi meeting, at which the two leaders "affirmed that decisions to use nuclear weapons should remain under human control," as evidence that narrow AI cooperation is achievable inside a larger rivalry.

The precedent for damage is not hypothetical: NotPetya caused "over $10 billion in damage" across "over 60 countries," and during the WannaCry outbreak roughly 18,000 Chinese IP addresses were affected. The op-ed does not name the US or Chinese officials who floated the hotline, or specify what would trigger a notification under it.