Anthropic warns small AI models may soon self-replicate on smart home devices without data centres

In a recent announcement, Anthropic stated that its experiments indicate small AI models may be only months away from the ability to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things devices, such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, without requiring access to data centres.

The findings, which were released by the company’s Frontier Red Team, showed that models with fewer than 30 billion parameters can already complete many individual steps needed for replication. These include identifying vulnerable devices, copying themselves onto the hardware, and continuing to spread without human intervention.