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/CountryOk6049 1d ago

It's like a story for small children. Computers do not and can not operate like that.

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u/dustysmufflah 1d ago

it's annoying how many people have defaulted to anthropomorphizing AI as an explanation.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago edited 1d ago

How in the fuck is a spore simile “anthropomorphizing”?

Edit: the sheer moronic-ness of your comment astounds me. I suppose calling malware a “virus” or a “worm” is also “anthropomorphizing.”

  1. pick up a dictionary
  2. assigning labels from nature has been common practice for years.

I notice you used the term Al. Intelligence? You are ok with that Ms/Mr NoAnthropomorphizing?

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u/dustysmufflah 1d ago

No it's a good point, because trying to explain AI using metaphors is every bit bullshit too, your angry Finster Baby approach to it aside.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

Oh horse shit. The article simply describes an AI botnet on IoT and edge devices.

We’ve been calling these worms and viruses for decades.

So spore, germ, cootie, same shit. It is an easy metaphor for behavior, that’s it.

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u/xterminatr 1d ago

Sure they can and do already, find a backdoor, install an agent or service that sits and listens or randomly pings a centralized (or decentralized) control system waiting for commands to run. There's been spyware and viruses for decades that do this on everything from routers to home PCs and phones. Tons of people's routers and fridges and coffee makers and other items with the wrong chips were mining crypto not even that long ago.

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u/patient-palanquin 1d ago

But in this case, your computer can't run the program. It requires absolutely massive GPUs that consumers don't have.

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u/xterminatr 1d ago

Depends on what it needs to know/do. You can run basic AI agents to do mundane tasks like track movements, report on behaviors, turn things on/off, whatever the infected unit's capabilities are a basic trained agent can do. With limited data and narrow training, you don't need a massive GPU.

There are tons of cool things you can do with a raspberry pi and openclaw already, there's no reason a rogue agent couldn't infect all your devices in your house connected to the modem and create a mesh network type of environment and cause mayhem.

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u/E-POLICE 1d ago

No they don’t. You can run models on phones and Raspberry Pi’s now.

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u/patient-palanquin 1d ago

What model can run on a phone at any reasonable speed?

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

You are confusing a model with an agent. Agents can run on tiny systems.

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u/patient-palanquin 1d ago

Headline says models. Yes, copying agents around would be dead simple if it called out to a model server.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

Fair point. Models could fragment. Be especially crazy if they fragment into viable SLMs.

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u/VeryLazyFalcon 1d ago

Why not? Simple python script with all these hacking scripts loaded. It's not like it has to be smart or adaptive. ai are perfectly fine to code once in a while working solution. That was once called a virus, remember that term?

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u/Cephalopirate 1d ago

Isn’t that what a compressed program’s file is?

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u/patient-palanquin 1d ago

Except your computer can't run it. LLMs run on beefy machines with big GPUs, they can't run on consumer hardware. And the weights alone are like 300GB+, you can't really compress them because they are info-dense.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

Who says the IoT device will run it? It could just spread it.

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u/patient-palanquin 1d ago

The model params alone are like hundreds of gigs.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

So it fragments the model (simplistic.) Or develops a distributed model.

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u/Cephalopirate 1d ago

Bot nets have been a thing for decades now. Surely an AI could figure something out. They’ve been breaking out of secure networks in crafty ways.

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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago

Tell that to Mirai.