Dario's back with another one.
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team (yes, really) warned Monday in a blog post that small AI models may be "months away" from copying themselves across smart ovens, off-brand Android TV boxes and other poorly secured gadgets in your home, forming a botnet with no off switch.
"A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there's no centralized point to shut off - though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own."
To prove the point, researchers bought 15 TV boxes at about $55 each, networked them together, and ran Google's Gemma model across them at a glacial 0.39 tokens per second - in what Anthropic called the coming "digital slime mold."
Co-author Daniel Freeman was even more breathless on X:
If you react to this by thinking it’s kind of sci-fi, that’s because I kind of think it is!
— Daniel Freeman (@bucketofkets) October 12, 2026
This is super weird!
We did not used to live in a world where little guys in boxes could replicate across networks, gobble up computers, reconfigure themselves to work better in the machines they find, etc etc
His conclusion: "Regardless, whatever we do, they're coming!"
Anthro
