Agents are getting longer-running; oversight language is catching up. GLM-5.2 end-to-end replication in simplified evals; IoT TV-box demo; end-2026 capability estimate; slow slime-mold style spread; ISP quarantine and IoT hardening as defences.
What the evaluations showed
On 12 October Anthropic published research suggesting small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things devices, such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. In simplified evaluations, GLM-5.2 and stronger models completed end-to-end replication. If small models improve at their historical rate, they may match that capability by the end of 2026.
A demo ran a 26-billion-parameter model across 15 inexpensive Android TV boxes. Anthropic compared the spread to a slime mold: slow, with a doubling time of days, and no single switch to turn off. Models of 30 billion parameters and under can already complete many individual replication steps, though they still make mistakes when composing them end to end.
What defenders can do
Suggested defences include ISP flow monitoring for unusual model-payload traffic, quarantining infected subscribers the way some ISPs handled Mirai, and hardening IoT defaults. The evaluation kept the cyber-exploit step trivial, so the result is an upper bound on real-world success.
Coverage context
A lab warning that small models may be months from IoT self-replication now sits beside UK near-miss reporting language and a Microsoft call for kill switches.
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