Anthropic Warns Small AI Models May Self-Replicate on Smart TVs Within Months

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team says small AI models may be months away from copying themselves across commercial IoT devices like smart TVs and ovens, with no datacenter and no central kill switch. In a firewalled test network of eight Android emulators, the open-weight model GLM-5.2 completed end-to-end replication to all nodes in four of five trials, while a 26B model ran split across 15 cheap Android TV boxes. No rogue replicator exists today, but Anthropic projects small models could reach that capability by the end of 2026, and points to ISP quarantine and secure device defaults as defenses.