Anthropic warns self-replicating AI could spread to your smart devices

Anthropic is warning that small AI models could soon be able to self-replicate across consumer IoT devices, from Android TV boxes to smart ovens, creating distributed botnets capable of running AI workloads without relying on data centers.

The company's experiments showed that models could identify unfamiliar devices, connect them into a network, and prepare them to run an AI model.

Although the researchers successfully distributed the Gemma4-26B-A4B model from Google DeepMind on 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, they did not demonstrate a fully autonomous, self-replicating AI worm running on real IoT hardware.

However, they estimate that smaller models could achieve self-replication by the end of the year if they continue to improve at their historical rate.

“Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes,” Anthropic warns.