The world is buzzing with smart devices—gadgets that can connect to the internet and transmit data between one another. There are smartphones, smart speakers, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart rings, smart watches, smart vibrators (not joking), smart thermostats, smart ovens, smart desks, smart kitty litter boxes, smart toasters, smart washing machines, and on and on.

Very soon, the so-called “internet of things” (IoT) of which all these consumer products are a part could become the host for a self-replicating AI virus, spreading from device to device like a slime mold colonizing a petri dish.

That’s according to new research from Anthropic, which found that such an AI system could be just months away. The experiments on which that research was based, mind you, were pretty lax as far as cybersecurity protections go, and Anthropic didn’t actually create a fully autonomous “digital slime mold,” as it was so charmingly described in a company blog post. But the research does put a sharper edge on a long-standing fear within the cybersecurity community that AI systems could eventually escape human control and hijack consumer devices, turning them into a giant, distributed battery that would be difficult to shut down. Earlier this year, a team of academics used an anonymous open-source LLM to create an AI-powered worm that was able to exploit common cyber vulnerabilities, like reused passwords, to spread across a network of Linux, Windows, and IoT devices.

According to Anthropic, the most likely scenario is a smaller model—one with 30 billion parameters or fewer—self-replicating by infecting host devices that generate their own computing power rather than harnessing it from the cloud; “edge” computing is the technical term.

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