Anthropic Tests Two Steps Toward an AI Worm, Not Real-World Infection

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team tested whether AI models could run across low-cost devices and coordinate replication, demonstrating two steps that could contribute to a self-replicating computer worm but not a worm infecting real devices. The team ran Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 Android TV boxes priced at about $55 each. The distributed setup processed about 0.39 tokens per second. In a separate experiment, researchers used eight Google Cloud Platform nodes running an Android 15 emulator. An unauthenticated Android Debug Bridge port simplified access, making the setup an upper bound on real-world success.

Source: TokenPost