ANTHROPIC RUNS A 26B MODEL ACROSS 15 $55 TV BOXES TO TEST IOT SELF-REPLICATION

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team ran Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes with 4GB of RAM each, using pipeline parallelism at 0.39 tokens per second, to test whether small models could replicate across cheap IoT hardware. A 9B model got inference running on 8 of 9 hardware types tested, and a Kimwolf-sized botnet would total only about 40 H100s of compute. By their trend line, small models reach the needed capability in simplified tests by year-end.