[mitthrowaway2]

This has been written about in numerous places. There are multiple possible ways an AI might go about this if it saw that as its task; the probability of any one specific method being is of course lower than the total probability of the whole set. So any one method would be an unlikely and speculative scenario. The method in question could range from nuclear, chemical, biological, sabotaging agriculture, mass-producing CFCs or other pollutants, triggering wars, or other unforeseen approaches. Most scenarios allow that (a) the AGI is very smart, deceptive, creative, and resourceful, and can pose as a human or corporation to execute transactions; (b) the AGI is able to gain control over some means of funding, either legitimately or illegitimately, and thereby pay unsuspecting humans to perform seemingly-innocuous tasks like protein synthesis or package delivery; (c) you wouldn't see it coming, any more than you see the chessmate approaching several moves ahead, because the AGI would be appearing to be friendly and helpful along the way, and perhaps earning you lots of money, while it is secretly outsmarting you for its own ends.

For a nuclear approach, the AI would only have to hijack the least-hackproof of US, Russian, or Chinese arsenals in order to trigger an exchange from all sides. But it would probably opt for a different method that would do less collateral damage to its own resources.

This has been an issue raised since at least the early 2010s if not before, and so (arguably) predates the most recent round of US political polarization. The core arguments are unchanged, but became more urgent as AIs broke through several milestones thought to be decades out, such as defeating top human Go players, cracking the protein folding problem, and passing the Turing test with flying colors.