Self Replicating Malware

Anthropic details experiment showing small AI models could self-replicate on IoT devices

Anthropic published research finding that small, quantized open-weight AI models can run and potentially self-replicate across low-cost IoT hardware like off-brand Android TV boxes, by splitting workloads into shards across many devices. Models including Gemma4-26B-A4B and Qwen3.5-9B achieved inference using minimal memory per device, though Anthropic noted significant obstacles remain before a fully autonomous replicator is feasible.