Anthropic warns self-replicating AI could spread to your smart devices
Anthropic warns small models may soon self-replicate across insecure IoT devices, though its lab test did not produce a full worm.
Anthropic reports lab experiments suggesting small AI models could eventually self-replicate across poorly secured consumer IoT devices and form distributed inference networks. Using unauthenticated ADB access, researchers assigned roles to Qwen3.5-9B, GLM-5.2, Llama3.1-8B, Gemma4-26B-A4B, and Opus 4.8, and distributed Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 Android TV boxes. They did not demonstrate a fully autonomous worm; inference setup took roughly 28 to 150 hours depending on the model. Anthropic estimates models of 30 billion parameters or fewer could reach the needed capability by the end of 2026 if progress continues.
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