AI models may soon self-replicate without access to data centers

ares623

Could this be a way to self-DDoS a botnet of IoT devices? Let them use up all resources doing inference for instructions to replicate to the next one forever.

feverzsj

Like there is DDR5/HBM elsewhere.

evan_a_a

The post you actually want to read https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

alcomatt

pure anthropic anti open-model propaganda.

ginko

Anthropic: "Oh no! Small (open source) models might self-replicate. Better ban those. :^)"

krige

Oh yes I can totally see a webos TV, that has bugger all storage, hosting a 22B parameter model /s

rpozarickij

> It added that systems should be strengthened to make it harder for such AI agents to spread. We'll likely need a new name for them if such viral agents become a reality.

pid0x17

Interesting how much of our current timeline the show Person of Interest predicted.

moezd

Open models may complete these steps, so our models have been doing this for quite some time now. Better ban open models, I guess. Oh, and, does anyone else realise that what that agentic work is basically how you set up a productive VPS from scratch? How is that supposed to be frightening?

bob1029

Where does the intent and control come from in these fantastical scenarios? Propagation speed is also a massive factor. If it takes 200 hours to self replicate because of how slow the tokens are, the model will never propagate if the host machine is recycled every 100 hours. Also consider things like API tokens and sessions timing out.

pllbnk

Anthropic posts whatever nonsense they want, supposedly legitimate news organization potentially summarizes their post using Claude and spreads the word. RIP Journalism, 2026.

paulbjensen

AI models with worm/virus-like capabilities. Reminds me of that scene in Chernobyl where Mikhail Gorbachev reacts to Valery Legasov explaining how melted uranium reacted with dropped sand: "You have made lava?"

cobbzilla

Maybe they release the white-hat version first? In the future when the “AI viruses” are endemic and impossible to eradicate from our infrastructure, will we need “good guy AI” viruses chasing down the bad guys?

mattlondon

So all those chips? All that NVDA market cap? All not needed any more? We'll have AI capable of running on a lightbulb? Great if true. Bad for the hyperscalers, Nvidia, all the frontier labs apart from meta and Google since everyone can just run a LLM on their IoT coffee machine instead of paying someone else. Nice.

d--b

The skeptics among you are just embolding others to prove you wrong. It's obvious that open weight models can do that. The only steps needed are hacking a server, downloading themselves, run themselves. The only difficult part is finding a server to hack that also has enough computing resource and disk space. With the cost of running LLMS going down and number of powerful connected devices going up. It's inevitable that this is going to happen... I don't think regulation is the right way to fix this, but I think it's a problem we shouldn't ignore.

peri-cl

> "In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested... GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication" It's funny, the Anthropic post is essentially saying the same thing I read today in a r/LocalLlama thread, but rephrased to make it sound bad. I think it's great that, very soon, local models will be able to auto-magically install themselves on consumer hardware: to tune and configure inference kernels for whatever weird crap the user happens to have on hand. Making software compatible with diverse hardware used to be a hard problem!

iamniels

Dario, shut up. Open models exist and will always exist. You will have to compete against them. That is a good thing for 99.99% of the world, namely the payers of tokens. You are not going to convince us otherwise.

TeMPOraL

Access is temporarily restricted We detected unusual activity from your device or network. Reasons may include: Rapid taps or clicks JavaScript disabled or not working Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP xx.xx.xx.xx) Use of developer or inspection tools None of these happen to be true, but more importantly, none of these is in any way wrong. Fuck you, Reuters . And anyone who follows their lead on this. What times we live in.

bawana

imagine all those samsung phones running a self replicating AI-no cpu cycles left for the human owner

oefrha

I for one would love to see a fleet of “suck it Jian Yang” refrigerators. Maybe someone should train a self-replicating model series named Pied Piper.