But we do know one thing. If an AI is at least as smart as an average human programmer, then if it chooses to do so, it can clone itself onto a large fraction of the computer hardware in the world, in weeks at the slowest, but more likely in hours. We know it can do this because human-written computer viruses do it routinely, despite our best efforts to stop them. And being cloned millions or billions of times will probably make it smarter, and definitely make it powerful.

The AI will be much bigger than a virus. I assume this will make propagation much harder.