Anthropic warns AI models could self-replicate across home devices

Anthropic said Monday that small AI models are "months away" from developing the capabilities needed to replicate themselves across internet-connected devices in the home, marking the latest warning from the frontier lab about the technology's potential safety risks.

Anthropic described how AI models could potentially infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart ovens or Android TV boxes, and use their computing power to run themselves and spread to other devices, without relying on expensive data centers.

The AI model would be "challenging to shut down," Anthropic said in a blog post, "since there's no centralized point to shut off."

The company acknowledged that there is not yet a "fully rogue replicator."

Agents are, however, "becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain (and passing on their adaptations to future copies of themselves)," Anthropic said.

Anthropic's latest research adds to growing safety concerns around AI, such as the ability for models to carry out cyberattacks and the technology going rogue. In September, improvements in frontier models sparked industry-wide warnings of existential risks to humanity.

Executives and researchers at Anthropic and rival OpenAI repeatedly warned about the potential risks of increasingly powerful AI, with some calling for tighter guardrails and measures to control the pace of the technology's development.

Anthropic said it carried out various tests to see if AI could self-replicate. One of those tests involved running a small Google model, Gemma4-26B-A4B, across a network of 15 cheap off-brand Android TV boxes.