Anthropic says small models may self-replicate on home devices

On Oct. 12, 2026 Anthropic said small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto commercial IoT devices such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, with no single host to switch off. In its tests a 9B model got inference running on 8 of 9 hardware types, and only GLM-5.2 finished a simplified end-to-end replication. Anthropic said no current model is both small enough and capable enough to do that reliably on the smart TVs it tested, and Al Jazeera reported the lab's estimate that a small model could reach that level by the end of 2026.