Anthropic estimates that a hypothetical fleet comparable in size to the infamous Kimwolf botnet , which infected more than two million devices at its peak, could support approximately 133,000 instances of Gemma4-26B-A4B if every 15 devices collectively hosted one model. At the measured throughput (which benefits considerably from LAN latency), Anthropic says that such a fleet would provide roughly 40 Hopper H100-equivalents of inference capacity.
This is a very messy comparison that takes significant liberties with the data, but even at that it must be said that it's not particularly intimidating. We're talking about two million infected devices that must remain infected and operable for months (or years; infecting 2 million devices would take around 6,300 agent-years even with the fastest 28-hour stand-up speed) to produce less AI inference throughput than a few blades of previous-generation GPUs .
Anthropic notes that a real replicator could exploit other types of hardware, deploy different models across heterogeneous devices, and avoid loading model weights onto every compromised host. Those possibilities certainly complicate the comparison, but arguably they complicate it beyond the bounds of this discussion.
The research does identify a meaningful security concern: AI agents could make malware more adaptable to unfamiliar environments and reduce the amount of target-specific engineering required. A hybrid approach, combining conventional code for routine operations with AI-driven reasoning when unexpected conditions arise, could offer some of those benefits without requiring every compromised device to run an inference engine continuously. This is definitely concerning, but we've already seen AI agents using frontier intelligence write their own code to compromise secured systems , so that specific angle on this research isn't exactly groundbreaking.
Anthropic's experiments are useful in that they provide evidence that autonomous software configuration and simplified network replication are increasingly feasible, but turning those capabilities into a materially more dangerous class of malware will take improvements in model reliability, hardware compatibility, deployment efficiency, and the ability to overcome real-world security controls, which the firm didn’t test. There’s a ton of data and some interesting findings not discussed here in the actual paper, so if you’re interested in the research you should go check it out .
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Zak Killian Contributor Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.
Auxityne "And the only way you can protect yourselves from our hypothetical apocalypse worm is by giving us tons of money!" Reply
hotaru251 sad that the current internet will eventually likely need purged and replaced due to stuff liek that occurring Reply
bigdragon This reads like the kind of thing we were warned about via movies starring a buff Austrian guy and games starring a girl who wears a Dorito chip on her ear. I also immediately think of a rather well-known Ian Malcolm quote. Are we really ready for science fiction to become science non-fiction regarding AI? People constantly try to downplay that this sort of thing can and does happen with other tech. I'm mildly worried that Anthropic has already created and lost control of some sort of AI worm given how cavalier the biggest companies have been about racing towards AGI at any cost. Reply
bit_user hotaru251 said: sad that the current internet will eventually likely need purged and replaced due to stuff liek that occurring LOL, how are you going to purge it and what are you going to replace it with? This is Pandora's Box stuff. There's no going back to how things used to be. Auxityne said: "And the only way you can protect yourselves from our hypothetical apocalypse worm is by giving us tons of money!" Even that won't do it. Nobody can guarantee this won't happen. Perhaps they will take the antivirus route and have "guardian" AIs that actively watch for & try to block rouge or other malicious AIs… Somewhat paradoxically, this could be at least delayed if investors stopped pumping money into this sector, forcing them to slow down! Reply
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-warns-of-self-replicating-ai-worm-threat-that-doesnt-need-data-centers-to-self-improve-and-spread-current-deployment-is-impractical-but-could-become-a-worry-as-tech-improves#main
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