> Are they trying to tell us they have <1B param models that have Opus level hacking ability? Because otherwise this really just reads like another thinly veiled attempt to sabotage the open weight community.

No, they're saying:

1. they got 0.39 tokens/second on a network consisting of 15 $55 Android TV boxes running Gemma4-26B-A4B

2. A "9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested"

3. So far, only "GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication"

4. "If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year. Small weight-based replicators may be possible soon after."

- https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

I think perhaps they're talking about the model squirreling it's weights across edge devices, used as bulk storage, more than it's talking about using them for inference. Those could then be used by ai that wormed it's way into a datacenter to pull weights from those devices