Open-Source AI Worms: How Prompt Injection Becomes Self-Replicating

The release of Shai-Hulud's source code democratizes a previously sophisticated attack vector—prompt injection now requires only a GitHub account, not advanced threat actors. Existing security frameworks cannot defend against natural-language instruction hijacking, leaving agentic AI systems vulnerable to lateral propagation across interconnected pipelines. This threat fundamentally challenges the trust assumptions in multi-agent architectures where outputs from one system become inputs to another.