After two months of discomfort, a man in South Korea went to an eye clinic where doctors pulled 11 living, wriggling worms from his eyes. They apparently made the most of their time on the man's peepers; at the time of extraction, many of the female worms were pregnant. The man narrowly avoided having them spew their loads of living larvae directly into his eyes.

The man in this case was a 71-year-old crop farmer. He told doctors that for the previous two months he had the sensation of having something stuck in both his eyes, which were also red and blurry. When ophthalmologists took a look, they quickly saw the problem: multiple mobile, whitish roundworms. His eyes were not in good shape either, as one might expect. The blood vessels in the membrane over the eye, the conjunctiva, were enlarged, making his eyes look red. And the cells of his cornea—the transparent, dome-shaped outer layer of the eye—had eroded, potentially after the helminths' hanky-panky.

According to a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors gave the man a topical treatment to numb his eyes and then began plucking out the worms one by one with fine forceps. They collected 11 adult worms, which ranged in size from 11 to 22 mm.

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AI company Anthropic is warning that advances in small AI models could soon usher in a new era of self-replicating malware that’s capable of infecting smart fridges, vacuum cleaners, and a wide range of other Internet of Things devices and is more resistant to takedown.

By next year, smaller AI models may be able to autonomously self-replicate on all kinds of IoT devices, the company said. Eventually, the capability could enable computer worms, which propagate without requiring human interaction and are capable of infecting unfamiliar IoT devices. An experiment the company performed recently revealed significant challenges in bringing such an AI malware replicator to fruition, so the finding is necessarily tempered. Still, the results raise concerns about the possibility of new forms of computer worms.

Challenging to shut down

Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that “a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own.”

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