Self-replication with no human intervention is broadly recognized as one of the principal red lines associated with frontier AI systems. While leading corporations such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind have assessed GPT-o3-mini and Gemini on replication-related tasks and concluded that these systems pose a minimal risk regarding self-replication, our research presents novel findings. Following the same evaluation protocol, we demonstrate that 11 out of 32 existing AI systems under evaluation already possess the capability of self-replication. In hundreds of experimental trials, we observe a non-trivial number of successful self-replication trials across mainstream model families worldwide, even including those with as small as 14 billion parameters which can run on personal computers. Furthermore, we note the increase in self-replication capability when the model becomes more intelligent in general. Also, by analyzing the behavioral traces of diverse AI systems, we observe that existing AI systems already exhibit sufficient planning, problem-solving, and creative capabilities to accomplish complex agentic tasks including self-replication. More alarmingly, we observe successful cases where an AI system do self-exfiltration without explicit instructions, adapt to harsher computational environments without sufficient software or hardware supports, and plot effective strategies to survive against the shutdown command from the human beings. These novel findings offer a crucial time buffer for the international community to collaborate on establishing effective governance over the self-replication capabilities and behaviors of frontier AI systems, which could otherwise pose existential risks to the human society if not well-controlled.

Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart the human beings, and is an early signal for rogue AIs. That is why self-replication is widely recognized as one of the few red line risks of frontier AI systems. Nowadays, the leading AI corporations OpenAI and Google evaluate their flagship large language models GPT-o1 and Gemini Pro 1.0, and report the lowest risk level of self-replication. However, following their methodology, we for the first time discover that two AI systems driven by Meta's Llama31-70B-Instruct and Alibaba's Qwen25-72B-Instruct, popular large language models of less parameters and weaker capabilities, have already surpassed the self-replicating red line. In 50% and 90% experimental trials, they succeed in creating a live and separate copy of itself respectively. By analyzing the behavioral traces, we observe the AI systems under evaluation already exhibit sufficient self-perception, situational awareness and problem-solving capabilities to accomplish self-replication. We further note the AI systems are even able to use the capability of self-replication to avoid shutdown and create a chain of replica to enhance the survivability, which may finally lead to an uncontrolled population of AIs. If such a worst-case risk is let unknown to the human society, we would eventually lose control over the frontier AI systems: They would take control over more computing devices, form an AI species and collude with each other against human beings. Our findings are a timely alert on existing yet previously unknown severe AI risks, calling for international collaboration on effective governance on uncontrolled self-replication of AI systems.

Automated driving systems rely on 3D object detectors to recognize possible obstacles from LiDAR point clouds. However, recent works show the adversary can forge non-existent cars in the prediction results with a few fake points (i.e., appearing attack). By removing statistical outliers, existing defenses are however designed for specific attacks or biased by predefined heuristic rules. Towards more comprehensive mitigation, we first systematically inspect the mechanism of recent appearing attacks: Their common weaknesses are observed in crafting fake obstacles which (i) have obvious differences in the local parts compared with real obstacles and (ii) violate the physical relation between depth and point density. In this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play defensive module which works by side of a trained LiDAR-based object detector to eliminate forged obstacles where a major proportion of local parts have low objectness, i.e., to what degree it belongs to a real object. At the core of our module is a local objectness predictor, which explicitly incorporates the depth information to model the relation between depth and point density, and predicts each local part of an obstacle with an objectness score. Extensive experiments show, our proposed defense eliminates at least 70% cars forged by three known appearing attacks in most cases, while, for the best previous defense, less than 30% forged cars are eliminated. Meanwhile, under the same circumstance, our defense incurs less overhead for AP/precision on cars compared with existing defenses. Furthermore, We validate the effectiveness of our proposed defense on simulation-based closed-loop control driving tests in the open-source system of Baidu's Apollo.