Anthropic: Small models may self-replicate on IoT devices
On October 12, 2026, William Zhou and Daniel Freeman, frontier red team researchers at the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a study. The article states that small models may have the ability to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices such as smart ovens and generic Android TV boxes within months. These replicas do not have a single shutdown point, and the doubling time may be measured in days, potentially adapting to unfamiliar devices on their own.Evaluation shows that a 9B model completed inference on 8 out of 9 hardware types. Models of 30B and below have been able to complete many single steps of replication, but errors occur when combined end-to-end; in simplified evaluations, GLM-5.2 and stronger models can achieve end-to-end replication. The team also distributed Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 generic Android TV boxes, each costing about $55, operating at a speed of approximately 0.39 tokens/second, with each box holding two layers of the model.End-to-end testing was conducted on 8 GCP nodes behind a firewall, propagating through an unauthorized ADB port and setting up Llama 3.1-8B inference. Among the tested open-source models, only GLM-5.2 completed replication fully, transmitting to all 8 nodes in 4 out of 5 trials. The article divides autonomous replication and adaptation into four steps: discovering the target, obtaining execution, establishing inference, and continuing propagation from the new host, stating that there are currently no complete uncontrolled replicas.
