Anthropic research tests AI models running on cheap TV boxes and spreading across an emulated networkMachine translation

Anthropic's research warns rogue AI agents may be months from hijacking smart home devices, copying themselves and spreading without human control. Its Frontier Red Team split Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes bought for about $55 each, running it at 0.39 tokens per second. That cluster shows cheap, poorly secured gadgets with 4GB of RAM can jointly host a capable model, since each box holds only 2 of its layers. The harder test asked models to scan a network, push weights and an agent harness onto new machines, and get inference running on each one. On a firewalled fleet of 8 emulated Android nodes, only GLM-5.2 completed the full cycle, reaching all 8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials and 7 in the fifth. GLM-5.2 is too large for TV boxes, but open models under 30B parameters gain 13.7 points a year on the Epoch Capabilities Index, reaching its level by late They also improve as they spread: when each Qwen3.5-9B instance inherited its predecessor’s notes, setup success rose from 45% to between 61% and 84%. Speed is the weakness, as a Kimwolf-sized fleet of 2M TV boxes would host roughly 133K model copies producing 80K tokens per second combined, about 40 H100s of compute. Each new 9B replica would also need about 28 to 51 hours of setup, and that slow, bandwidth-heavy spread would stand out in ISP flow monitoring. The decisive question is whether a sub-30B model crosses GLM-5.2’s bar before ISPs and device makers coordinate quarantines that no single network can enforce alone.