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Over at Anthropic, the company that owns Claude , researchers have completed a series of experiments that may suggest that small AI models are "months away" from being able to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices. These small AI models have the potential to act like "AI worms" that infect household smart devices, like your smart thermostat or video doorbell, and copy themselves to other devices in the network.

This is an example of autonomous replication and adaptation (ARA), which is one of the chief concerns surrounding the rapid improvement of AI capabilities. Currently, AI models require connectivity to a device like a powerful laptop or data center in order to function. This is both a technical limitation of AI in most of our lives, but also a failsafe because users can simply cut off the connection between the AI and its server if the model takes unwanted action. But an ARA-capable model is not so easy to shut down.…