Anthropic's Frontier Red Team believes small AI models may now be months away from being capable of self replicating without access to a datacenter. Quoting from the blog: 'The capabilities that make AI models generally powerful coding agents also generalize to cyber tasks, including autonomous replication. Like coding agents in 2024, we’re seeing signs of life for AI worms. We don’t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain (and passing on their adaptations to future copies of themselves). At the same time, increasing amounts of inference compute are now available both inside and outside of datacenters (see Appendix D). It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits. 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. 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. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.'

The crew believed their journey would last only 123 years. It was a mission that would span generations, but they had a destination, a purpose, and the promise of a new beginning waiting for them. Then they opened the ship’s log and discovered something terrifying. Not 123 years, but 923 years had passed. What was meant to be a carefully planned voyage had turned into a journey nearly a millennium into the future. The civilization they once knew had changed beyond recognition, and everyone who remembered their departure had been dead for centuries. But the most unsettling discovery was that humanity’s last colony ship had been completely erased from memory. At some point during those lost centuries, their mission had faded into obscurity. No one was waiting for their arrival. No one remembered their sacrifice. The crew had spent generations traveling toward a future that had already forgotten them. They weren’t just arriving in a different world. They were entering an age in which their very existence had become a forgotten chapter of history. Imagine dedicating generations to securing humanity’s future, only to discover that humanity had continued without you—and no one even remembered you were coming.