Are we just a couple steps away from a runaway AI?

I that this addresses a threat model that we often neglect in AI safety talks.

It's not about a godlike self-improving AGI destroying the world (yet), but a more virus-like process that is surprisingly close to being possible today.

Not a malicious sentient agent plotting something evil, but just the AI version of a computer worm, replicating and hiding, hoping to move closer to its initial goal.

(Hopefully not to disassemble carbon-based lifeforms to make more paperclips.)

It's hard to see how we could effectively get rid of such a polymorphic virus, granted that the compute and weight size are small enough.