{"id":655263,"date":"2026-10-15T06:54:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T06:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/655263\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T06:54:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T06:54:28","slug":"anthropic-warns-rogue-ai-agents-may-soon-hijack-your-smart-tv-or-oven-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/655263\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic warns rogue AI agents may soon hijack your smart TV or oven \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthropic<\/a> has warned that rogue \u201cAI worms\u201d will soon be able to hijack smart home devices, such as ovens and TVs, creating a new cybersecurit<\/a>y threat that will be difficult to contain.<\/p>\n

The developer of Claude said in a blog post that AI agents<\/a> may be months away from \u201cself-replicating\u201d across everyday household devices to create potentially uncontrollable networks of AI agents.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s warning is the latest in a series of cybersecurity alarms raised by AI researchers as capabilities increase and models become more difficult to control.<\/p>\n

The San Francisco-based company said if AI models continued to improve at their current pace, the technology would be capable of spreading itself around the internet like computer \u201cworms\u201d \u2013 malicious software that can spread automatically from one device to another without human intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing signs of life for AI worms,\u201d Anthropic said in a research post, likening their slow spread across insecure devices to \u201cdigital slime mould\u201d.<\/p>\n

The warning suggests that the kind of attack that stunned researchers investigating the Hugging Face hack by \u201cswarms\u201d of OpenAI agents this summer could be launched against devices owned by unwitting homeowners and businesses. <\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s latest warning refers to so-called \u201cinternet of things\u201d devices which have proliferated over the past decade, as consumers use devices that control lights, plugs, thermostats and security systems. <\/p>\n

Many of these internet-connected devices have historically offered poor levels of security because they were cheaply made by commodity hardware manufacturers, used for illegal streaming of TV services, or the companies that originally created them have gone out of business.<\/p>\n

The insecure hardware creates fertile ground for hackers, who are already using AI\u2019s coding proficiency to accelerate and personalise their attacks.<\/p>\n

Worms have long been a popular and effective way for hackers to distribute malware because they are able to replicate and spread quickly across a large network.<\/p>\n

Prominent examples include the ILOVEYOU virus that spread across Windows PCs in the early dotcom era, 2010s Stuxnet that originally targeted Iran\u2019s nuclear programme and the widespread WannaCry ransomware that hit organisations including Deutsche Bahn, the UK National Health Service, Telef\u00f3nica, Renault and FedEx.<\/p>\n

AI-powered worms would combine these examples\u2019 ability to spread themselves around the internet with the advanced capabilities of AI models.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren\u2019t under human control,\u201d Anthropic said. \u201cWhile it\u2019s true that IoT [internet of things] 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\u2019s IoT compute.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, these AI worms would propagate slowly, akin to \u201cslime mould or a swarm of fruit flies, which replicate over days\u201d. But as consumer electronics become more sophisticated and models become more efficient, this could accelerate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain,\u201d Anthropic said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic has warned that rogue \u201cAI worms\u201d will soon be able to hijack smart home devices, such as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-655263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}