Anthropic Warns AI Could Self-replicate on Home Devices Within Months

Anthropic has warned that small artificial intelligence (AI) models could replicate themselves across everyday internet-connected devices, including smart TVs and ovens, within months, raising concerns about potential cybersecurity risks.

The AI company In a research report published on October 12, 2026 said its experiments showed that small models could perform many of the steps needed to identify vulnerable devices, install AI models on them and spread copies without human intervention.

Anthropic said that if small models continued improving at their historical rate, they could reach the capability level demonstrated in its simplified replication experiment by the end of 2026.

According to the company, its experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable of replicating themselves on commercial internet-connected devices, including inexpensive Android TV boxes and smart ovens.

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes,” the company said.

The research however examined whether inexpensive consumer devices could provide computing power for AI models without relying on specialised data-centre hardware.

In one experiment, Anthropic ran Gemma4-26B-A4B, a model with 26 billion total parameters, across 15 inexpensive Android TV boxes costing about $55 each. The system achieved an inference speed of approximately 0.39 tokens per second.

The model was divided across the devices, allowing them to work together to run it, demonstrating how computing resources spread across relatively cheap consumer hardware could be used to run a much larger AI model.

Anthropic tested whether AI models could locate devices, install software, transfer model files and spread copies to other machines and also  found that models with 30 billion parameters or fewer could complete many individual tasks but often struggled to carry out the entire replication process autonomously.

In another experiment, a nine-billion-parameter model successfully configured AI inference on eight of the nine hardware types tested. This suggested that smaller models could operate across different types of consumer devices.

Anthropic warned that an AI replicator spread across multiple devices could be difficult to contain because it would not rely on a single central system that could be switched off.

“A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off.”

The researchers estimated that a replicator could take one to two days to spread to another host under the conditions considered in their analysis.The estimates used an inference-speed baseline of approximately 0.3 tokens per second.

The company said the findings highlight the need to improve security on internet-connected consumer devices as AI models become better at carrying out complex tasks.