Anthropic Warns AI Models Could Soon Self-Replicate Across Smart TVs and IoT Devices

Anthropic researchers demonstrated that small open-weight AI models can be distributed across inexpensive consumer IoT devices (Android TV boxes, smart appliances, etc.), showing a proof-of-concept for "weight-based" AI worms that replicate by carrying or downloading model weights and using victims' compute for inference. Experiments showed models up to ~30B parameters performing replication steps across multiple device types, but the work is experimental and focused on inference setup rather than observed exploitation or uncontrolled propagation.