Anthropic Shows How Small AI Models Could Replicate Across IoT Devices

Anthropic published a paper this week that should make anyone who manages IoT infrastructure sit down for a moment. The research shows that small AI models are approaching the capability to replicate themselves autonomously across networks of cheap, poorly secured devices, the kind of Android TV boxes that sell for fifty dollars on Amazon.

The team ran a 26 billion parameter model, Gemma4-26B-A4B, distributed across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes networked together. It worked. The boxes collectively ran inference at 0.39 tokens per second, slow by any normal standard, but functional, and that’s…