Anthropic has warned that small artificial intelligence models may be only months away from being able to copy themselves onto cheap household gadgets, from smart ovens to budget television boxes, and keep running there on their own, with no data centre and no human operator behind them.
The warning comes from the company's Frontier Red Team in research published on 12 October by William Zhou and Daniel Freeman. What unsettles them is less that it might happen than how hard it would be to stop. A worm of this kind would have no central server to switch off. It could creep from one device to the next, roughly doubling its numbers every few days, and work out how to run on hardware it had never seen before. Ordinary malware cannot do that. It has to be written for its targets in advance.
