AI models may soon self-replicate across smart-home devices, Anthropic warns

Anthropic said on Monday that small AI models could be months away from self-replicating across internet-connected devices, raising the possibility of AI botnets spreading quickly, fighting takedown attempts and even breaking into data centers to turbocharge their growth. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei first floated the idea that within the next year or even sooner, AI might be able to hijack "the entire internet" with "a persistent botnet," a warning that raised eyebrows in the cybersecurity community. Botnets — vast networks of devices controlled by malicious operators — have been around since the early days of the internet, and are still around. The network typically includes poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as Android TV boxes, smart appliances and security cameras, and is used by hackers to send spam, seed malware, or sabotage target companies using floods of bogus traffic. Anthropic's Monday blog post appeared to be the first attempt to articulate how that might happen. The company said that its experiments showed that a malicious AI agent could stit