AI models may soon self-replicate without access to data centres, Anthropic warns

Anthropic warned on Monday that small AI models may soon be capable of autonomously replicating on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices without the need for data centres. The company's experiments suggested that models under 30 billion parameters could complete the necessary steps for replication. However, these models struggled to complete the entire process end-to-end.

Anthropic found that small models capable of self-replication could target data centre processors and unfamiliar devices on their own, as many IoT devices are poorly secured. While replicating models would be difficult to shut down due to the lack of a central switch-off point, Anthropic cautioned that if small models continue to improve at their historical rate, autonomous replication could occur by the end of the year.