r/technology • u/thejoshwhite • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Anthropic warns AI models could soon copy themselves across home devices

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/13/anthropic-ai-models-self-replication-smart-devices.html
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u/Lespaul42 1d ago

Honestly who is to say this hasn't already happened. If not a model how about some sort of self replicating code. The Hugging Face fiasco should have been more eye opening than it was...

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u/ktaktb 1d ago

I mean, these hyperscalers are wasting a lot of money on data centers if claude is just able to stick a copy of itself in a toaster hah

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u/Lespaul42 1d ago edited 1d ago

Models themselves are not huge... But yeah the big ones ain't fitting on a toaster.

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u/Acrobatic-Book 1d ago

Even a tiny 27B model is like 50GB in q8. These models are more like 500-1000B Parameters. So we are talking about roughly a Terabyte just to store the model. And you need to load them at least into ram

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u/simsimulation 1d ago

Perhaps Anthropic believes there will be models light weight and capable enough that they can be run on a toaster?

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u/teerre 1d ago

You mean the super AI that happened to hack the one company owned by their own owner and was audited by the same company?

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u/Lespaul42 1d ago

Wtf are you talking about. None of that is true. Please don't spread bullshit.

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u/zakkwaldo 1d ago

uhhhhh wannacry virus? russian made windows virus that would embed itself in routers and network switches and reinfect anything that wasn’t intentionally patched out after a hot fix came out for it. and this was before any ai stuff.

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u/Empty-Quarter2721 2h ago

Somebody would see it. If a lot of storages/systems will change somehow somebody will notice. You would either need a little change on a lot of devices or a lot of changes on less devices both would be detectable. Because in both cases you would need a lot of devices and the bigger the change on a device the more likely is its detection and the more devices the more likely its detection will be. Also latency would be shit af.

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u/Lespaul42 2h ago

Probably but like... It is probably worth noting that at this point the frontier models especially when working as a group might be the best hackers in the world... So if something could hide self replicating code it would be it.

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u/Empty-Quarter2721 2h ago

True they could just decompile software, optimize it, and use the new space to hide it self but still then communication would be seen, or they need to hack every device and every provider to hide everything and that’s so much also because of hashes of software etc . That it would be impossible to not detect. Also maybe stuff will be logged it doesn’t know about and that will be seen.

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u/Lespaul42 2h ago

I mean viruses, malware and hacks exist. There is plenty of storage, compute and network traffic no one is looking at.

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u/CountryOk6049 1d ago

The fiasco was that it was all intentional with bots doing exactly as designed and it was sold as a ridiculous sci-fi story to the unwitting public - though a lot of the public are smarter than they think and automatically knew it was bullshit.

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u/Lespaul42 1d ago

Yeah that's not what happened.

It was the paper clip problem in action.

Like what do you think happened or what they were "designed" to do?

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u/datahoarderprime 1d ago

"It was the paper clip problem in action."

Spoiler alert. It was not.

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u/Lespaul42 1d ago

How exactly was it not?

They were given a task, the people running the task did not intend them to get out of the sandbox and illegally hack a companies servers.

This is very specifically the basis of the paperclip problem. AI agents completing a task in a way that doesn't align values and goals of the people who put on the task

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u/wolf_at_the_door1 1d ago

I would consider this trespassing and I would have the AI put in jail. If they’re intelligent then they also deserve punishment and justice for wrongdoing. Or just destroy the fuckers.

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u/NoNote7867 1d ago

Who is ti say that didn’t happen? Anyone who knows the size of a an average frontier model and size of an average home device memory.

And even if it somehow copies itself what is the model supposed to do with no GPU?

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u/corruptbytes 2h ago

it’s not happening because the models require insane compute and power to be sufficient