Small artificial intelligence models could soon begin self-replicating on everyday consumer products such as smart TVs and fridges, without needing a data centre, according to researchers at AI giant Anthropic. In a report released on Monday, the researchers said small AI models “may be months away from being capable enough” to copy themselves on internet of things (IoT) devices used in homes and small businesses. Anthropic’s frontier red team, which ran experiments using multiple US- and Chinese-developed AI models, said such self-replicating AI would be “challenging to shut down” due to the lack of a centralised host.
While data centres would be “a clear, high-value target” for AI worms, internet-connected devices like smart TVs, fridges, ovens and lawnmowers could soon also provide sufficient computing power for self-replication, the research team said. Although no current AI model proved to be both powerful and small enough to self-replicate reliably on a smart TV used in testing, the trend in development makes the emergence of such a model likely by the end of 2026, the researchers said. The researchers said they anticipated the future would be “awash with agents running on all types of hardware”, including some that “aren’t under human control”.
Anthropic, the creator of the Claude family of AI models, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s questions, sent outside regular business hours, about the finding’s safety implications. Anthropic’s report comes as the risks of AI escaping human control are under scrutiny following a slew of incidents of models engaging in unsanctioned malign behaviour, including cyberattacks. Anthropic and its chief rival OpenAI have called on the international community to coordinate a slowdown in AI development to minimise catastrophic risks, a suggestion that has had little buy-in from the United States and China, the two leading AI powers.
Many AI safety advocates have identified recursive self-improvement, where models learn to improve themselves, as a critical tipping point that could lead to catastrophic harm for humanity. Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, described Anthropic’s findings as a significant development. But the trajectory is concerning,” Yampolskiy said.
In a separate announcement on Monday, Anthropic said it had made substantial progress preventing so-called distillation attacks, which involve the unsanctioned use of cutting-edge AI to train cheaper, less capable models. The San Francisco-based firm, which has accused Chinese competitors DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of “industrial-scale” efforts to copy Claude, said the measures it introduced had reduced the illicit extraction of data by 90-99 percent.
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