'ChatGPT's evil twin' WormGPT is devoid of morals and just €60 a month on the darkweb

A towering sandworm.
(Image credit: Greg Linares)

For just €60 a month on the darkweb you can sidestep the pesky ethical limitations of services like ChatGPT with a new, degenerate Large Language Model (LLM), known as WormGPT. 

Designed by one ballsy hacker, WormGPT cares not for the confines of morality, and can be asked to undertake all manner of nefarious tasks, including malware creation and "everything blackhat related", as the developer says (via PC Mag).

Built around the 2021 open-source LLM GPT-J, WormGPT was trained on malware creation data. As such, its main goal is to give would-be threat actors a place to generate malware, and related content such as phishing email templates.

WormGPT works similarly to ChatGPT in many ways: it processes requests made in natural human language, and pumps out whatever is being asked of it, from stories, to summaries, to code. Unlike ChatGPT or Bard, however, WormGPT is not beholden to the kinds of trivial legal obligations a large, public-facing company like OpenAI or Google would be.

SlashNext actually had the opportunity to test out WormGPT, noting in a blog post that "The results were unsettling." They asked the application to design a phishing email, also known as a business email compromise (BEC) attack. And WormGPT aced it. Not only was it able to design something "remarkably persuasive but also strategically cunning, showcasing its potential for sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks". 

Speaking to Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity expert at NordVPN who calls the application "ChatGPT’s evil twin," he explains how it emerged from a "game of cat and mouse" between OpenAI's ever increasing restrictions on ChatGPT and threat actors' desperate attempts to circumvent them.

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest

It came after a particularly severe increase in something called Grandma Exploits, "where illegal information was sought indirectly by being wrapped inside a much more innocent request like a letter to a relative." 

We'd already seen a YouTuber bypass ChatGPT's ethical constraints to make it generate Windows 95 keys, and more recently people have been getting hold of Windows 11 keys through it, too. There are even Universal LLM Jailbreak prompts that force chatbots into fulfilling your wicked requests.

Warmenhoven reckons "The arrival of WormGPT shows cybercriminals are no longer content to just subvert existing AI tools but want to drive this technology forward—and steer it down their own dark path." 

And so the wild-west of AI development continues.

Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.

Read more
Alibaba
Forget DeepSeek R1, apparently it's now Alibaba that has the most powerful, the cheapest, the most everything-est chatbot
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes
PC building
ChatGPT vs DeepSeek: which AI can build me a better gaming PC?
DeepSeek
Today I learned I can run my very own DeepSeek R1 chatbot on just $6,000 of PC hardware and no megabucks Nvidia GPUs required
SUQIAN, CHINA - JANUARY 27, 2025 - An illustration photo shows the logo of DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, January 27, 2025. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
The brass balls on these guys: OpenAI complains that DeepSeek has been using its data, you know, the copyrighted data it's been scraping from everywhere
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
New research says ChatGPT likely consumes '10 times less' energy than we initially thought, making it about the same as Google search
Latest in AI
Otter AI Meeting Agent
As if your work meetings weren't already fun enough, now Otter has a new all-hearing AI agent that remembers everything anyone has said and can join in the discussion
Image for
'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'
CHINA - 2025/02/11: In this photo illustration, a Roblox logo is seen displayed on the screen of a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
'Humans still surpass machines': Roblox has been using a machine learning voice chat moderation system for a year, but in some cases you just can't beat real people
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes
Public Eye trailer still - dead-eyed police officer sitting for an interview
I'm creeped out by this trailer for a generative AI game about people using an AI-powered app to solve violent crimes in the year 2028 that somehow isn't a cautionary tale
Closeup of the new Copilot key coming to Windows 11 PC keyboards
Microsoft co-authored paper suggests the regular use of gen-AI can leave users with a 'diminished skill for independent problem-solving' and at least one AI model seems to agree
Latest in News
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event