Engadget reports that Anthropic's Frontier Red Team found small AI models may be only months away from replicating and spreading across insecure devices, creating slow, hard-to-kill autonomous botnets. Experts broadly agreed that such capability could emerge in the near future, but Georgia Tech professor Michael Bailey disputed the characterization of the emulation as full self-replication. He said it demonstrated sharding and device hopping in a network where the exploit was trivial, rather than worm-like propagation, and that Anthropic did not attempt model retraining. Anthropic suggested that internet service providers notify customers of infections and limit infected devices to a safe list of websites, as well as possible regulation. Bailey separately emphasized patching, device isolation, strong passwords and security hygiene.