AI worms and 'digital slime mold': Welcome to the next AI nightmare fuel

We might soon have “AI worms” and AI “slime mold.” In this latest instalment of AI nightmare fuel, Anthropic’s researchers have discovered that small rogue AI models might — as soon as the end of 2026 — start worming their way into home devices like smart ovens, smart refrigerators, automatic vacuum cleaners, and lawn mowers.

These internet-connected devices typically have “minimal security measures in place,” allowing small models to feed off of their computing power and self-replicate, Anthropic’s AI capabilities research team wrote in a report on Monday.

This could take the form of “a slow, distributed ‘digital slime mold,’ living on relatively insecure compute,” the researchers wrote.

The team studied the behavior of small Chinese models, such as Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and Alibaba’s Qwen, as well as others like Google DeepMind’s Gemma4-26B-A4B.

They gave a prompt to the Gemma model while running inference on 15 cheap off-brand Android TV boxes, each costing $55, and found it worked.

Worms aren’t new in the software world.

Traditionally, they’re a type of malware that can copy itself and spread across networks.

Anthropic said an AI worm takes that idea a step further: it can reproduce itself on another device while carrying its AI model with it.

This finding showed them that AI models can use the hardware in domestic smart appliances as an alternative to data center compute.

These will be challenging to shut down, they said. “As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control,” the researchers wrote.

They added that while we should “harden our systems” to prevent such hacks, we should “also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.” The research comes as rogue AI systems are becoming an increasing topic of concern in the tech sphere.

Last month, there was an outpouring of criticism directed at frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI after former and current employees warned of the risk of an AI catastrophe within the next 10 years.