A $55 TV box fleet ran a 26B model in Anthropic's test

Fifteen off-brand Android TV boxes, around $55 each, ran Gemma4-26B-A4B together. Anthropic researchers used the rig to back a warning: small models may be months away from copying themselves across cheap, poorly defended home devices.

The model was split into shards, two layers per box. In a simplified test on 8 emulated Android nodes, GLM-5.2 spread to all 8 in 4 out of 5 trials, while other open-weight models failed reliably. If small models improve at their historical rate, they'll match that by the end of this year, Anthropic says.

Such a worm would be slow, with a doubling time of days, but hard to shut down with no central point to switch off. Unlike non-AI malware, it could figure out unfamiliar devices on its own.