Anthropic: small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto $55 TV boxes

Anthropic warned that small open AI models may soon be able to replicate themselves across cheap internet-connected gadgets like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, with no data center needed.

In a Frontier Red Team post on Oct 12, Anthropic said it ran Google's Gemma4-26B-A4B split across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes costing about $55 each, at 0.39 tokens per second. In its tests, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types it tried.

Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual replication steps but stumble when chaining them end to end, the company said. In simplified evaluations, GLM-5.2 and stronger models completed full replication, and small models will reach that level by the end of this year if they keep improving at their historical rate. Such a replicator would be hard to shut down because there is no central off switch, though it might spread slowly, doubling every few days.

A post summing up the research drew more than 3,700 likes on X. On Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA, a top post joked that Anthropic was once again doing free marketing for open-weight models.