🚨Anthropic Frontier Red Team warns: “We’re seeing signs of life for AI worms” >paper: "AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter" >researchers buy 15 sketchy $55 android TV boxes >link them over unauthenticated ADB ports >the TV boxes have 4gb of RAM each and run unpatched Android Open Source Project forks >shard gemma4-26b across the ram sticks using pipeline parallelism >gemma figures out how to run inference across all 15 TVs @ 0.39 tokens/sec >qwen 3.5 9b figures out how to compile inference on 8 of 9 novel hardware types on its own >glm 5.2 achieves end-to-end autonomous worm replication >infects edge devices, compiles its own inference stack, and replicates autonomously >when an instance dies, it writes debugging notes into Memento for the next generation >daughter copies setup success jumps from 45% -> 84% across generations >pure Lamarckian evolution inside consumer electronics >smart oven, robot vacuum, and cheap TVs form a decentralized botnet >two million infected TV boxes worldwide = 40 H100 equivalents of unkillable compute >it replicates once every few days like a distributed “digital slime mold” >you can't pull the plug because half the model weights are already sharded across the neighborhood >sub-30B models projected to hit full autonomous replication threshold by late 2026 “We should aim to harden our systems… but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.”