Small AI Models May Soon Be Able to 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.
Rather than exploitation, which prior studies have already examined, the team focused on whether models could get AI inference running on unfamiliar hardware. A 9-billion-parameter model did so on eight of the nine hardware types tested.
The researchers then tested the full replication cycle on a closed network of eight emulated Android devices, with...
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