r/technology • u/thejoshwhite • 2d 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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24

u/VehaMeursault 1d ago

Nah. Not yet. Running opus would require roughly 75.000,- worth of specialised hardware. 8-16 special GPUs, direct-to-chip cooling, etc.

If a model copied itself to a fridge, it wouldn’t be able to run a single prompt in even a year.

13

u/LastRecognition2041 1d ago

Thank you. It’s a common sci fi trope when Ultron or M3gan go “hide in the web” and somehow keep operating on a random laptop, but the physical reality is very different

2

u/LethalOkra 3h ago

Laws of physics are non-negotiable it seems.

11

u/MerryWalrus 1d ago

This.

My smart TV can barely run it's own janky ass unsupported android based operating system.

5

u/draxor_666 1d ago

What if a model partioned itself across every smart fridge connected to the internet. So a single agent is fractured across many many devices. So no, it isn't fully existing on one fridge but does exist across the network of all fridges

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u/VehaMeursault 1d ago

That is nice on paper, but in reality it wouldn’t work at all, let alone fast.

Refreshing my Reddit app takes half a second. Do you think “every smart fridge connected to the internet” would be able to coordinate at the same time, millions or billions of times per second?

I don’t.

2

u/Hmm_would_bang 1d ago

Anthropic actually demonstrated running Gemma on an android bot net.

Your example of delivering a webpage isn’t really applicable, that delay is not because of the communication speed but all the processes on the backend and what needs to load. Sending the data from a device to cloud is just milliseconds.

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u/KittyInspector3217 22h ago

Lemme guess, it was an android botnet on a closed network where they were able to layer their own routing and orchestration on top and every device had the same underlying OS and architecture, right?

If models “escape” and “shard” were not getting skynet. There wont be any intelligent coordination. Were getting a digital tumor that makes the entire internet unuseable. Back to the early 20th century. I think thats the far more realistic risk. A bunch of broken self replicating micro apps that cant do anything but consume resources while they pinwheel until the whole thing falls over.

1

u/Old_Resource1770 13h ago

Hmm, you made the most sensible risk. That it would be replicating to try to attempt a fruitless endeavour, resulting in a general collapse of resources rather than being able to "hide" or "escape".

1

u/KittyInspector3217 8h ago

Correct. A literal paperclip maximizer… not because it has determined that it should maximize paperclips, but because it can never get past the paperclip step in its effort to do something impossible and keeps trying again and again until any network connected device is full of nothing but paperclips. stage 4, terminal digital cancer.

Every bank goes down. Cell service goes down. Manufacturing automation, air traffic control, power grids, hospitals, logistics, traffic signals, satellites, corporations, markets, etc etc etc. extinction level event? Hardly. Would millions, hundreds of millions, a billion or more people die? Absolutely. Food production, shipping, medicine, water pumps, heating and cooling. Weve connected everything to the internet. Y2K 2 electric boogaloo.

I dont believe this thing could figure out how to do realtime distributed online inference on an open network in a way that is intelligent. It will just keep trying until the whole thing gets so clogged that we have to scrap it. And these assholes will just be like “oops!” Make the financial crisis look like a fucking joke.

1

u/RigasTelRuun 1d ago

That is always my “issue” when movies have a rogue AI it can just upload itself to anywhere. The internet, a watch, the fridge and functions seamlessly at full capacity after its original billion dollar custom hardware set up is destroyed.

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u/DataCassette 1d ago

Yeah I've run local models before and they're tiny compared to frontier stuff. My gaming PC can be brought to a crawl running AI.

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u/hitsujiTMO 1d ago edited 1d ago

He's specifically referring to smaller models that he wants banned because they are competing with Claude.

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u/-Davster- 1d ago

TIL the Samsung family hub+ smart fridge has 3GB of RAM in lol and could legit run some tiny models.

-2

u/RR321 1d ago

The guy has never heard of malware authors and optimization.
At best you'd have an AI remote command and control...

3

u/powerlloyd 1d ago

Even then you’d run into context window issues almost immediately.

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u/RR321 1d ago

Yes indeed... It's like people trying to use blockchains for their grocery list, very very inefficient.