Fifteen cheap TV boxes ran a 26B model in Anthropic's test

Researchers bought 15 off-brand Android TV boxes at ~$55 each, wired them together, and ran Gemma4-26B-A4B across them. Anthropic says small models may be months away from copying themselves onto gadgets like these, or smart ovens.

A replicator like that would be hard to shut down, since there's no central switch, though it may be slow, with a doubling time of days. A 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types tested.

Only GLM-5.2 completed the full cycle among the open-weight models tested, reaching 8/8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials on an emulated fleet. Anthropic expects small models to match it by the end of this year if they keep improving at their historical rate.

The setup was simplified: the worm's own model ran on a separate server, and the hacking stages were mostly left out.