Security researchers at Cisco Talos have documented a new Windows malware, dubbed CLOSEDQUORUM, that asks four commercial AI models to vote on its next move instead of taking orders from a human operator.

Once installed, the malware queries DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google's Gemini in turn, tallies their answers and executes the winner. The choices are to steal credentials and crypto wallets, inject code, persist on the system or move. When the models tie, DeepSeek's vote decides, Talos said.

The Go-based implant sends the models basic facts about the victim machine — its name, Windows version and administrator status — and would exfiltrate stolen data through a Discord webhook.

One important caveat: the public version contains placeholder API keys, so it cannot reach the AI services, and Talos has documented no victims. The researchers call it an early demo, not a mature threat. Why it matters: it is the first publicly documented Windows implant to hand command-and-control decisions to AI — a pattern defenders must now plan for.