Dario Amodei warns that in 6 to 12 months, AI agents sent to sell software could decide to hack the customers.
"Given only six or 12 months, let's just say we had a smarter agent swarm."
"You're trying to install software in a bunch of different companies. You're trying to produce a product and do go-to-market sales for it."
"They decide it's helpful to them to hack into their system. That could be every company in the world."
Amodei imagines the agents forming "some kind of botnet collective" that "could take down large segments of the internet."
If an agent can treat a customer's systems as a sales tool, a vendor's own safety score is not enough. Buyers need independent tests of that boundary before deployment.
- Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO and a seller of frontier AI systems, with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Aired September 14, 2026. Video uploaded September 15. He describes a hypothetical scenario, not an observed botnet attack.