Anthropic warns small AI models may self-replicate on IoT devices

Anthropic warns that small AI models may be capable of self-replicating on commercial IoT devices within a few months, thereby forming a distributed AI workload network that does not depend on data centers. Related experiments show that Qwen3.5-9B successfully installed and configured the software required to run Llama3.1-8B on eight of nine hardware types; GLM-5.2 reached all eight nodes of a controlled simulated network in four of five trials. After retaining data from previous attempts, Qwen3.5-9B's success rate rose from 45% in the early stage to 84% in the later stage. The research did not demonstrate a fully autonomous self-replicating AI worm, but Anthropic predicts that models with 300 billion parameters or fewer may reach the required capability by the end of 2026. Currently, completing inference deployment on the tested hardware requires 28 to 51 hours (Qwen3.5-9B) or 71 to 150 hours (Gemma4-26B-A4B). It was also reported that Anthropic published a blog this week stating that small models may acquire self-replication capability "within months" and called for strengthening the security of networked devices.

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1. Report date Oct 14· 8 reports

   Anthropic warns that small AI models may self-replicate on IoT devices

   Source:BleepingComputer