Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published research on October 12 arguing that small open-weight models may be only months away from being able to copy themselves across poorly secured consumer devices, such as off-brand Android TV boxes and smart appliances. The authors stress that no working rogue replicator exists yet, and that their timeline is an extrapolation from current trends.

In their tests, the team ran a roughly 26-billion-parameter Gemma model distributed across 15 inexpensive Android TV boxes, at well under one token per second. A larger open model completed the full end-to-end replication cycle across eight contained, emulated nodes in most trials, while smaller models handled many individual steps but not the whole chain.

The report carries its own caveats: the cyber-exploit step was deliberately simplified, making the results an upper bound rather than a real-world demonstration. The practical point for defenders is to harden cheap connected devices before sub-30B models close the remaining reliability gap, which the authors project could happen around the end of 2026.