There's a number of science fiction scenarios where the public internet becomes so vile a place that it simply becomes unsafe to be there.
The problem is that, in general, if you can get a bit from here to there, then you're going to be vulnerable to the possibilities of malicious communication. But we're going to want our AI agents to be able to get from here to there for a lot of "there"s; what's the value of an agent that can't speak to anyone? Much, much less than one locked away in a prison.
There isn't going to be a solution where we just lock them away and we just try really, really hard to filter everything they're doing. They're too smart for that already and we only want them smarter.
Basically, the security apocalypse we've been worried about for so long is upon us, albeit only beginning. Either we secure ourselves and all our services properly to the point that it's OK that potentially misaligned non-human agents are running around on the public internet and they still can't hurt us through our security, or the public internet becomes so dangerous that the only practical solution is to no longer connect to it and we all have to become very, very careful what we let through, to a degree of detail far beyond any current-day available network filter.
The problem is that people that put the agents on the net are not the ones that will feel the consequences.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-ai-...
Excellent example of agent enabled hacking (driven by a person) leading to massive numbers of cards stolen.
Welcome to Cyberpunk, only blackwall is the fictional part and the demon filled net is not.
Wasn't the public internet an extremely vile place couple of decades ago? I think we will need a LOT of new infrastructure akin to traditional firewalls and spam filters. I don't think we know how to build those today, but seems like an important research direction, rather than calling calling it doomsday IMO.
Same as any organism, you need an immune system. There's an explosion of bacteria just beginning out there. None of us are immunized.