Anthropic's Frontier Red Team says in a new report that small AI models may be only months away from self-replicating on commercial IoT devices such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes — replicators that would be hard to shut down because there is no central point to switch off, though they may be slow, with doubling times measured in days. In the evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of 9 hardware types, and models of 30B parameters or under already complete many individual replication steps while still erring end to end; in simplified tests, GLM-5.2 and stronger models managed end-to-end replication. The team also ran Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 roughly $55 off-brand Android TV boxes with 4GB of RAM each at about 0.39 tokens per second, and used the Memento framework to pass failure notes to later generations, lifting success from 45% to 84%. Anthropic says it has not yet seen a fully uncontrolled, self-replicating program.

Anthropic·GLM-5.2·Zhipu AI·+5