Small AI models may soon turn cheap IoT devices into a worm
Anthropic says small models may be months away from self-replicating across cheap IoT devices, creating malware that is difficult to stop because it has no centralized shutoff. In its test, Gemma4-26B-A4B ran across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes costing about $55 each, at 0.39 tokens per second. A separate 9B model ran inference on 8 of 9 hardware types tested, showing the bottleneck is adapting models to unfamiliar devices, not just finding them.