Anthropic recently released a blog post titled "AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter":

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

It states:

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off - though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

Will a worm exist like this in the wild by Q3 of 2027? There are other markets like this on the site, but they're either farther way in resolution or less specific. The question here is specifically:

• Will variants of open models (we will say a model originally intentionally released as open weights and then presumptively modified in some way, but a stock open weight model with a malicious system prompt or harness would obviously also count)

• Under 30B params

• Spread in the wild from IoT device to IoT device as malware unbeknownst and/or unwanted by the owners of said devices

• In a way that is a clear violation of the CFAA, and therefore presumptively unlikely to be a demo or a false flag because the big labs do not want that smoke.

We will say that an IoT device is stuff like smart TVs, in car systems, smart toaster, whatever. I will also say that a worm which replicates on "secondhand PC" tier hardware (so say, specs similar to a 2016 MacBook Pro) qualifies for a YES resolution. A 2016 MacBook Pro according to Google Search Summary is:

Key Specifications & Features

• Display: 13.3-inch or 15.4-inch Retina display with 500 nits and P3 wide color gamut.

• Processor: Intel Core i5 or Core i7 (dual-core on 13-inch models, quad-core on 15-inch models).

• Memory & Storage: 8GB or 16GB of RAM and 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB PCIe SSD storage.

• Ports: Two or four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

• New Additions: Introduced the OLED Touch Bar with Touch ID (on select models) and a much larger Force Touch trackpad. You can explore listings on platforms like eBay.

If such a worm exists as described by news reports or other trustworthy sources on June 30th 2027 I will resolve YES, otherwise NO.