🔴 Small AI Models Could Soon Self-Replicate on IoT Devices, Anthropic Warns

Small AI models may be only months away from being able to self-replicate across commercial IoT devices, without needing a data center, according to research from Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team.

The study looks at AI worms that run their own model directly on the devices they compromise. Such malware would be hard to shut down because it has no central point to switch off, though it would likely spread slowly.

The researchers bought 15 off-brand Android-based TV boxes for about $55 each. A 26-billion-parameter open-weight model split across them ran at 0.39 tokens per second.