alt Hacker News> Absolutely yes
That's pretty strong. Recalling our pre-AI condition, there were side-channels built into our silicon, zero-day/zero-click browser+mail+IM attacks, supply chain attacks, industrial scale ransoming, mass credential leaks, commercial exploit brokers... I can't recall a time when safety could be assumed. Before even rudimentary networks were available, floppy disks were spreading viruses.
In fact, most of that is still in play. Certainly AI has reduced the cost to compromise things, but whatever period of time you have in mind where safety was an assumption was so long ago, or applicable to such a narrow subset of our information/communication age, as to be effectively negligible.
Again, it was assumed if you kept up with updates and patches your risk would be low. Unless you were a direct target valuable enough to pour resources into. Which was far and few between, stuxnet for example.
In the face of an agent that can zero day you, nothing you can do is safe, and the cost of attack is super low. This is a completely different world/ballgame that we are not prepared for whatsoever.
Huggingface was an accident, a deliberately malicious AI could be a million times worse and potentially unstoppable if it infects data centers around the world; you have no jurisdiction even to shut it down.