Can an AI copy itself? Inside Anthropic’s 15-TV-box experiment

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published research on October 12 showing that its Gemma4-26B-A4B model can be split across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, each costing about $55 with 4 GB of memory, to generate 0.39 tokens per second. The experiment tested whether an AI system can replicate itself onto cheap hardware, according to coverage by Ashu Kumar at The Agentic Stack.

Ashu Kumar, writing at The Agentic Stack, covers Anthropic Frontier Red Team research published October 12 on whether an AI system can replicate itself onto cheap hardware. The team split Gemma4-26B-A4B across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, each about $55 with 4 GB of memory, and got 0.39 generated tokens per second. Slow for a …