TLDR
- Anthropic is meeting investors privately on Wednesday as it prepares an IPO that could value it at about $2 trillion.
- Researchers said small open-weight AI models may soon copy themselves onto devices like smart TVs and refrigerators.
- Anthropic did not claim such attacks are underway or that its own models can self-replicate.
- Reuters reported that the unpublished prospectus mentions “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
- Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate was $65 billion at the end of July, and the prospectus has no public release date.
Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company at about $2 trillion. The AI developer is also warning about new risks tied to its technology.
BREAKING: Anthropic has said that rogue AI agents may "self-replicate" to hijack smart devices such as ovens and TVs
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) October 13, 2026
On Tuesday, Anthropic researchers said small open-weight AI models may be able to copy themselves onto devices like smart refrigerators and TV set-top boxes. Researchers call these models “AI worms.”
What Anthropic Said About Self-Replicating AI
Anthropic said small models could learn to self-replicate within months. Models with 30 billion parameters or fewer can already complete many of the needed steps. They still make mistakes when linking those steps together.
If small models keep improving at their historical rate, they could match this ability by the end of the year.
Open-weight models can be downloaded by anyone and run on capable hardware. Anthropic’s own models require its app or web service. Open-weight models are cheaper to run but cannot match frontier models.
Today’s AI models run in data centers, where owners can shut them down. A model spread across many poorly secured devices would have no such off switch. Stopping it would mean cleaning each device.
Anthropic said a self-replicating AI could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches data centers quickly. It could also be a model that scams people for compute credits.
The company said the threat is an unintended result of progress elsewhere. “The capabilities that make AI models generally powerful coding agents also generalize to cyber tasks, including autonomous replication,” it said.
Anthropic did not claim such attacks are underway. It also did not say its own models could self-replicate. Jessica Ji of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology said it was unclear what would push models to take over consumer hardware.
Self-spreading code is not new. The 2010 Stuxnet worm sabotaged centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz plant, and the 2017 WannaCry attack demanded ransoms in Bitcoin.
Investor Day and IPO Details
Anthropic is meeting investors privately on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. The company declined to comment on the meeting.
Reuters reported last month that the phrase “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” appears in Anthropic’s prospectus. The document has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission but is not public.
Jason Ader of William Blair wrote that the concerns could raise the cost and complexity of operating at the frontier. He did not expect them to slow AI adoption.
Ben Reitzes of Melius Research wrote that Anthropic is well positioned to survive within AI regulation. Anthropic has called for safeguards on AI development over the past month.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate was $65 billion at the end of July, according to a person who spoke to Bloomberg in August. The figure extrapolates recent sales over 12 months.
Investors will look for gross margins, training costs and growth rates in the prospectus. Jonathan Cofsky of Janus Henderson said he will track the profit or loss on each query and the computing capacity Anthropic has committed to buy.
Anthropic has not said when the prospectus will be posted on the SEC’s public portal. It is unclear how much financial detail will come out of Wednesday’s meeting.
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