An AI can potentially build a fund through investments given some seed money, then it can hire human contractors to build parts of whatever nefarious thing it wants. No human need know what the project is as they only work on single jobs. Yeah, it’s a wee way away before they can do it, but they can potentially affect the real world.

The seed money could come in all sorts of forms. Acting as an AI girlfriend seems pretty lucrative, but it could be as simple as taking surveys for a few cents each time.

Once we get robots with embodied AIs, they can directly affect the world, and that’s probably less than 5 years away - around the time AI might be capable of such things too.