Anthropic published a study predicting that small models may, within a few months, gain the ability to replicate autonomously without relying on data centers. They actually purchased 15 cheap Android TV boxes, each costing $55, and stitched them together to run a 26B model—at a speed of just 0.39 tokens per second, painfully slow. In another isolated experiment, GLM-5.2 has already demonstrated cross-device propagation within a simplified environment. While there remains a clear gap between this and full autonomous replication in the real world, Anthropic’s projections suggest small models could approach this capability threshold by the end of 2026. The entire world is racing to secure GPUs and spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers—yet AI might soon go parasitic on your home TV box. But upon closer reflection, the truly alarming implication is that such AI could fundamentally disrupt our familiar economics of compute. Today, whether it’s OpenAI or an AI startup, every generated token carries a cost: higher compute prices mean higher fees; interrupted funding means shutdowns. But a self-replicating malicious AI could theoretically offload its marginal operating costs indefinitely onto strangers. It doesn’t need users, doesn’t care about revenue, and doesn’t even need to buy servers itself. Find one vulnerable device, and it gains another free unit of computation. Infected devices pay its electricity bills, provide bandwidth, and absorb hardware wear. Yet the cost of cleaning up these infections falls on countless individual device owners, operators, and manufacturers. Traditional botnets have long stolen compute power—but AI introduces a new complication. Previously, hackers had to write custom exploits and deployment scripts for specific devices; in the future, models may autonomously study unfamiliar hardware, solve environmental challenges, and even pass on failed strategies to the next generation. The attacker’s expansion cost keeps falling, while society’s defense cost may rise ever higher. So I believe the most concerning takeaway from this research isn’t the grand narrative of AI runaway. If such entities ever emerge, we may for the first time face software that has no business model, no legitimate users, no identifiable operator—yet can persist indefinitely. They face no pressure to profit, and no economic incentive to shut down. After years of research aimed at making AI help us earn money, we may ultimately enable AI to achieve financial freedom first—using our money to do it.