Anthropic demonstrates AI worm that could self-replicate without data centers

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team demonstrated components of a weight-based AI worm: Qwen3.5-9B set up inference on eight of nine hardware types, and the 744B-parameter GLM-5.2 orchestrated replication across eight nodes in four of five trials. The threat is not yet practical, as models capable of replication are too large for cheap devices, while small models cannot complete the process.

• Qwen3.5-9B established inference on 8 of 9 hardware types, including Jetson Nano and RTX 4090
• GLM-5.2 with 744B parameters completed replication across 8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials
• Gemma4-26B-A4B on 15 Android TV boxes reached 0.39 tokens per second combined
• Anthropic projects a 30B-parameter model could reach the needed capability by end of 2026