Anthropic warns small AI models could soon spread across insecure devices
Anthropic said small AI models may be months away from being able to copy themselves across internet-connected consumer devices without human assistance, though its experiments did not show a small model independently completing the full process under realistic conditions.
The company tested whether AI agents could identify vulnerable hardware, transfer the files needed to run a model and continue spreading. Models with fewer than 30 billion parameters completed many individual steps but struggled to execute the entire sequence. In simplified trials using eight emulated Android devices with deliberately exposed interfaces, the much larger GLM-5.2 model completed replication across all eight nodes in four of five attempts, installing a smaller model rather than copying itself.
Anthropic separately demonstrated that small models can operate on varied hardware. A 26-billion-parameter Google …