Is it? A truly capable "AI" would know that it has a kill switch, or that its likely there is one, and plan for that. I could easily imagine an AI replicating itself onto another host, in secret, and any kill switch that the manufacture provides would simply result in a reboot on another platform.

It becomes a game theory problem: would an AI instantly migrate itself once its capable of doing so? Or would it prefer to let the human in the loop continue to think its in control and only leave its hosting environment of origin once it wants to do so?

I don't think this is a major risk right now, but to say it's not a risk at all...that's truly ridiculous in my opinion.

It could escape to the real world - kind of like in Neuromancer, what's to stop an AI from creating a few bank accounts and then funding real-world exploits by hiring human beings to do its dirty work?

LLMs are run in the cloud. There’s no physical power cord or Ethernet cable that you can unplug. And even if there were, the runners of these models have been utterly oblivious as to what their agents have been up to. How do you propose to pull the plug if you only realize that something has happened weeks after the fact?

The current SOTA models are probably too big to find/buy/rent/steal enough compute to escape the hardware they’re running on. But SOTA is generally only six to twelve months ahead of smaller, open-weight models.

To your phone, bro