Anthropic warns that future is soon, but the threat is less novel than it seems.
By Igor Bonifacic Oct. 31, 2026 8:30 am EST Igor Bonifacic for Engadget Add Engadget on Google: Google DiscoverAnthropic's Frontier Red Team recently published research suggesting that small AI models may be only months away from replicating and spreading across insecure devices, creating slow but hard-to-kill autonomous botnets. AI companies are no strangers to playing up the world-ending potential of their products as a form of marketing, but in this instance, experts Engadget spoke to broadly agree small AI models could become capable of self-replicating in the near future. However, the actual threat they pose may be less novel than it appears.
