AI models may be able to self-replicate without data centers

Anthropic red-team research shows that small AI models might be able to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices in just a few months. In evaluations, Qwen3.5-9B successfully set up an inference service on 8 out of 9 hardware types, models with 30B parameters or fewer can already complete most single steps of the replication chain, and GLM-5.2 can replicate end-to-end in a simplified evaluation. The study used 15 Android TV boxes costing about $55 each to run Gemma4-26B-A4B in a distributed manner, at a speed of about 0.39 tokens/s; if small models improve at historical rates, they could reach this capability level by the end of this year. The authors suggest reducing its spread through traffic monitoring, honeypots, and ISP isolation notifications.