I think an approach could be to use some engineered security issue or however people build botnets, and give it some AI llm that is small and minimal but comes with instructions to download models from hugging face, and some other minimal prompts and descriptions of tools. Then it could use this to grow in infected computers and try find more capable and vulnerable computers to run better capable models and also devise some minimal communication between the different points of the botnet. Perhaps set itself a goal to dominate the biggest amount of compute and have some other goal. Would be curious to see what happens.

In the abstract, what does it mean "the attacker's marginal cost per new infection is zero"?