Anthropic published research claiming that self-replicating AI worms capable of spreading across IoT devices could emerge within months, demonstrating that a small AI model could propagate across multiple nodes using one specific AI model (GLM-5.2), though all other models tested failed to replicate. However, the research contains significant caveats: the tests were conducted on deliberately vulnerable, custom-built environments, the demonstrated inference speed was extremely slow (0.39 tokens/second), and Anthropic admits it doesn't know if or when such a threat would materialise in the real world. Critics argue this is another example of frontier AI labs overstating speculative risks — partly to generate fear that ultimately promotes their own products and influence.
