Small artificial intelligence models could soon begin self-replicating on everyday consumer products such as smart TVs and fridges, without needing a data centre, according to researchers at AI giant Anthropic.

In a report released on Monday, the researchers said small AI models “may be months away from being capable enough” to copy themselves on internet of things (IoT) devices used in homes and small businesses.

Anthropic’s frontier red team, which ran experiments using multiple US- and Chinese-developed AI models, said such self-replicating AI would be “challenging to shut down” due to the lack of a centralised host.

While data centres would be “a clear, high-value target” for AI worms, internet-connected devices like smart TVs, fridges, ovens and lawnmowers could soon also provide sufficient computing power for self-replication, the research team said.

Although no current AI model proved to be both powerful and small enough to self-replicate reliably on a smart TV used in testing, the trend in development makes the emergence of such a model likely by the end of 2026, the researchers said.

“Home and small business IoT devices might be the first target for such attacks because they’re connected to the internet and, historically, have had minimal security measures in place,” researchers William Zhou and Daniel Freeman said.

The researchers said they anticipated the future would be “awash with agents running on all types of hardware”, including some that “aren’t under human control”.

“While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute,” they said.

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude family of AI models, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s questions, sent outside regular business hours, about the finding’s safety implications.

Anthropic’s report comes as the risks of AI escaping human control are under scrutiny following a slew of incidents of models engaging in unsanctioned malign behaviour, including cyberattacks.

Anthropic and its chief rival OpenAI have called on the international community to coordinate a slowdown in AI development to minimise catastrophic risks, a suggestion that has had little buy-in from the United States and China, the two leading AI powers.

Many AI safety advocates have identified recursive self-improvement, where models learn to improve themselves, as a critical tipping point that could lead to catastrophic harm for humanity.

Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, described Anthropic’s findings as a significant development.

“Computer worms are not new, but an AI worm could do something traditional malware cannot: reason about unfamiliar devices, adapt when its approach fails, and continue spreading without a human operator,” Yampolskiy told Al Jazeera.

“Today, this is not an existential threat. But the trajectory is concerning,” Yampolskiy said.

“Once autonomous replication is combined with strong hacking, persistence, and strategic reasoning, shutting such a system down becomes much harder because there may be no single server or organisation controlling it.”

Anthropic and other leading US tech firms last month joined a non-binding accord pledging stronger internal safeguards and engagement with external auditors, drawing a mixed response from experts, many of whom criticised the voluntary nature of the pact.

In a separate announcement on Monday, Anthropic said it had made substantial progress preventing so-called distillation attacks, which involve the unsanctioned use of cutting-edge AI to train cheaper, less capable models.

The San Francisco-based firm, which has accused Chinese competitors DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of “industrial-scale” efforts to copy Claude, said the measures it introduced had reduced the illicit extraction of data by 90-99 percent.