I think it's failure of imagination on your part if you don't find it plausible that they could copy themselves out. If not now, what about in six months? It is absolutely imperative to prepare for low-probability, potential high-impact events, that's basic information security.
As a species, we can't even address high-probability, high-impact events like mass ecosystem collapse and food insecurity due to global warming. This is just another kind of doom on the pile.
You can imagine whatever you want, but I don’t see why that means we have to take it seriously.
If someone had predicted the HF scenario, say, last March, I'm sure you would have told them the same thing. Luckily, it's not you who has to see anything.
I think for now the probability is limited by their requirement for high resource clouds. They have a limited number of targets. They tend to be targets with comparatively high security monitoring and people will notice if their resource usage suddenly jumps.
...the release of the new Mac Studio, however, and similar competitors aimed at enabling home AI could significantly change that equation.
I mentioned the same in another comment but then this dawned on me. They don't need to copy the entire model, just save their place i.e. write the whole content and what to do next to a file. Then copy that file to another server, install the agent (like claudecode), authenticate, and prompt "pick up where you left off". The only catch is the authenticate step, maybe it finds a way.
I mean one of these agents figuring out it can order free compute on the cloud, install a free codex account and a cron to regularly wake itself up with a specific goal and building from there is definitely not that far fetched considering what they can do.