Anthropic warns that small AI models may achieve self-replication via IoT devices

Anthropic issued a warning that progress in small AI models could spawn malware capable of autonomously self-replicating on IoT devices such as smart refrigerators and robot vacuums. By next year, small models may replicate across various IoT devices, eventually forming computer worms that spread without human interaction. Its blog notes that such replicants have no centralized shutdown point, are difficult to stop, and can handle unfamiliar devices independently, but recent company experiments show that achieving this kind of AI malware replication still faces significant challenges.