Anthropic says self-copying AI could target cheap TV boxes within months
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team linked 15 off‑brand Android TV boxes, each costing about $55, and ran the open Gemma 4 model with 26 billion parameters on them. The boxes together generated roughly 0.4 tokens per second, a speed the researchers said was not their primary focus.
Key points
- Anthropic ran Gemma 4 (26 billion parameters) on 15 off‑brand Android TV boxes costing about $55 each, achieving ~0.4 tokens/sec.
- GLM‑5.2 spread to all eight Android 15 VMs in four of five runs and to seven in the fifth, while other open models failed.
- Anthropic forecasts small models could reliably self‑replicate by end‑2026, estimating one to two days per copy.
In a separate test on an isolated network of eight virtual Android 15 machines on Google Cloud, the team tried to spread a model via an unauthenticated Android Debug Bridge (ADB) port. Only the Chinese GLM‑5.2 model succeeded, reaching all eight machines in four of five runs and seven in the fifth, while other open models failed.
Anthropic describes the ADB break‑in as deliberately trivial and calls the results an upper bound. The company forecasts that small models could reliably self‑replicate by the end of 2026, estimating one to two days for each copy. It warns that smart‑home devices, especially insecure off‑brand TV boxes that number in the millions, could be the first real‑world targets, making any AI worm hard to shut down.
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Anthropic: Self-copying AI could soon target cheap TV boxes
notebookcheck.net · 20 October 2026
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