Yeah, lab leak is hard enough to contain with human viruses, but labs have well established protocols to prevent it happening.

Computing doesn't have good protocols except for air-gapping, we really just have lots of layers of best-effort detection, and billions of devices which mix data and instruction often in a careless fashion.

I used to not believe in the dangers of AI or the risk of internet-collapse from "rogue AI", but a genuine self-mutating virus could genuinely take down the internet and need an entirely new separate net. ( Or we'd discover if the current backbone actually has the power to break encryption to stop it. )

And this time, you can bet any new internet would be corporation captured. CompuServe and AOL failed because of the open internet, but we're a very different world now, governments would support the corporation led locked-down approaches for "safety".

I don't for a second believe the capability is actually there yet, but it's no longer unthinkable that such a thing could be created in a lab within a decade. Once out in the wild, there's a lot of idle compute out there to harness for self-improvement and spreading.