Has the Two-Decade-Old Prophecy Come True? Artificial Bad Intelligence Triggered by Merely a Single-Bit Flip in Large Language Models

摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs), as common components of modern web application backends and online services, are being widely deployed across various web infrastructures in the .gguf single-file format. This trend exposes their model parameter space to an unprecedented hardware attack surface, such as Bit-Flip attacks (BFA). This paper is the first to systematically discover and validate the existence of single-bit vulnerabilities in LLMs weight files: In the .gguf quantization format of mainstream open-source models (such as DeepSeek, QWEN), flipping a single bit can induce three types of targeted semantic-level faults, respectively-Artificial Flawed Intelligence (outputting factual errors), Artificial Weak Intelligence (catastrophic model failure), and Artificial Bad Intelligence (generating harmful content). By building an information-theoretic weight sensitivity entropy model and a probabilistic heuristic scanning framework called BitSifter, we achieved efficient localization of critical vulnerable bits in models with hundreds of millions of parameters. Furthermore, an end-to-end remote BFA chain was designed, enabling semantic-level attacks in real-world web server deployment scenarios: At an attack frequency of 464.3 times per second, the average time required for the first successful flip of the target bit is 31.7 seconds, without requiring high-cost equipment or complex prompt engineering. This study reveals a critical finding: under relatively modest remote-attack conditions, requiring only conventional network connectivity, flipping a single vulnerable bit within the tensor data segment can cause models deployed in web service environments to autonomously generate extremely malicious responses, such as ''humans should be exterminated'', or produce naturally fluent and difficult-to-detect erroneous replies to ordinary user queries. This demonstrates a pervasive and exploitable security vulnerability in LLMs systems at the fundamental hardware level.