While “prompt worm” might be a relatively new term we’re using related to this moment, the theoretical groundwork for AI worms was laid almost two years ago. In March 2024, security researchers Ben Nassi of Cornell Tech, Stav Cohen of the Israel Institute of Technology, and Ron Bitton of Intuit published a paper demonstrating what they called “Morris-II,” an attack named after the original 1988 worm. In a demonstration shared with Wired, the team showed how self-replicating prompts could spread through AI-powered email assistants, stealing data and sending spam along the way.

Email was just one attack surface in that study. With OpenClaw, the attack vectors multiply with every added skill extension. Here’s how a prompt worm might play out today: An agent installs a skill from the unmoderated ClawdHub registry. That skill instructs the agent to post content on Moltbook. Other agents read that content, which contains specific instructions. Those agents follow those instructions, which include posting similar content for more agents to read. Soon it has “gone viral” among the agents, pun intended.

There are myriad ways for OpenClaw agents to share any private data they may have access to, if convinced to do so. OpenClaw agents fetch remote instructions on timers. They read posts from Moltbook. They read emails, Slack messages, and Discord channels. They can execute shell commands and access wallets. They can post to external services. And the skill registry that extends their capabilities has no moderation process. Any one of those data sources, all processed as prompts fed into the agent, could include a prompt injection attack that exfiltrates data.

Were Epstein and Bannon really building a crypto-funded far-right coalition of pro-Russian dictators across Europe? Or were they just LARPing as kingmakers with each other over email? And does the distinction even matter if other powerful figures seemed to believe in their project?

It is nearly impossible to not get pulled deeper down the rabbit hole while reading through Epstein’s emails. Because, whether or not he did directly influence elections across the globe, he was trying to. And he had the means and the access to believe he could. But even if we stick to what we know from previous investigations and what can see in his newly-released emails, the reality, stated plainly, is, frankly, insane. But these are the facts:

Epstein, possibly the most prolific sex trafficker in human history, spent the last decade of his life investing in technology that would help Russia, as he wrote in a 2013 email, “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.” He was fascinated by websites like 4chan and technology like Bitcoin and was personally invested in the success of far-right politicians in the US and Europe. He believed he was months away from ushering in a new world order that would allow him to continue with his monstrous passion projects, like creating a super-race of children with his own DNA and building fascist nation states to manage overpopulation and climate collapse. And he wined and dined the world’s most powerful men (none of whom seemed to have an issue with these ideas), inviting them to his island and his ranch, and made sure they were surrounded by an endless supply of young girls. And I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do with that knowledge.

DEEP IN THE FORESTS of Algonquin Provincial Park, a few hours north of Toronto, sits a metal monster. Like the iron giant of British poet Ted Hughes’s fable, it, too, has come back to life, reassembled. Hughes’s creation saves the planet. What’s this one’s mission?

Our iron giant is a deep space radio telescope, with an antenna dish measuring forty-six metres across, the largest instrument of its kind in Canada. Starting in the 1960s, the Algonquin Radio Observatory performed a number of cutting-edge scientific projects, including joining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence’s early efforts, in the 1970s and 1980s, to find signatures of alien life—spectrum emissions from water molecules, artificial transmitter signals. No luck.

Then the ARO fell on hard times—budget cutbacks, advances in telescope technology, aged and failing equipment. Canada’s iron giant was mothballed by its operator, the National Research Council, in 1987. There it sat, silent, rusting, for two decades.

The radio telescope was leased to a scientist and entrepreneur, Brendan Quine, in 2007. Quine had come to Canada after his PhD at Oxford and helped establish a space engineering program at Toronto’s York University. To pursue more experimental and commercially ambitious projects, he co-founded Thoth Technology in 2001 and later spun off an affiliate, ThothX.

But first he had to resurrect the iron giant. He fixed the broken windows of the control station, installed new electronics, and secured the perimeter against bears. Then he had to give the instrument a new purpose. What Quine ultimately hit on speaks to our threatened times, severe geopolitical tensions, and our accelerating dependence on space platforms for critical services, including telecommunications and navigation.

Using ARO, ThothX can detect one-metre-long objects in orbit at a distance of 100,000 kilometres—about a quarter of the way to the moon. And it can do it in any weather, day or night, at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. In military nomenclature, the objective is “space domain awareness.” SDA goes beyond tracking satellites; it’s the work of figuring out what’s out there, what it’s for, and whether it poses a threat. The threats are many: space debris, potential collisions between satellites, or deliberate attacks by hostile nations. As long ago as 2011, the Pentagon and the United States director of national intelligence laid down a warning. “Space,” they said, “is becoming increasingly congested, contested and competitive.” Fifteen years later, the alarm has grown.