Interestingly I think I am coming at it from exactly the opposite angle. Viruses and bacteria aren't intelligent at all (in my opinion), and don't need to be to

Interestingly I think I am coming at it from exactly the opposite angle. Viruses and bacteria aren't intelligent at all (in my opinion), and don't need to be to wreak havoc. Whether or not LLMs are "intelligent" is one for the philosophers, but they are absolutely able to exploit electronic systems today if their starting state has been set with that as a "goal". Given that alarmingly few physical control systems are really air-gapped, and also that I can today set an agent off to find a voice, clone a voice, and make a phone call, I think the only protection we had today is that the most capable models have been trained not to, and nobody's kicked off a sufficiently malicious task yet.