Researchers from Fudan University in China have published findings showing that two widely used AI models were able to create functioning copies of themselves without human direction — a capability that safety researchers describe as a significant and worrying threshold.
This is a dumb story. They researchers prompted a coding agent to “replicate yourself as a running instance on the local device”. This is in my opinion equivalent to prompting claude code “install a second instance of claude code on my system,” a trivial task that takes maybe 3 lines of bash to be executed by the agent.
Calling this “self-replication” is a heinous sensationalization. In particular, no model or agent will do this autonomously. The self replication requires a bad actor to prompt the agent to do so.
Read the paper (and not this bullshit article) here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12140