Artificial intelligence is getting better at everything, including hacking. It’s becoming easier than ever before to steal someone’s identity, cripple sensitive banking and health care systems, or hold a company’s data ransom. And if cybersecurity defenders aren’t ready, cyber attackers will exploit AI to wreak havoc.
“The timeline is not years, it is months,” the multinational intelligence group Five Eyes warned June 22. The newest AI technology “lowers barriers for malicious actors and increases the speed and complexity of attacks.” Five Eyes is a secretive alliance dating back to World War II in which Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States work together to gather intelligence or respond to security threats.
Two new models, Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, have each proven capable of independently planning and carrying out a full takeover of a simulated corporate network. That means a single hacker could do what once required a large team, says AI security expert Michael Alexander Riegler of Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. These models can also find and exploit security holes in operating systems, browsers and other software at an expert level, which could leave defenders scrambling to patch vulnerabilities.
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