Autonomous attacks powered by AI agents are becoming more common, Jessica Ji, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), told Fortune . This is primarily happening because the tools have “gotten meaningfully better” over the past year or so, she said. Specifically, AI companies have improved their models’ coding skills, which has led to a “dramatic increase in their ability to do cybersecurity-relevant tasks like analyze large volumes of code,” she said. Also, they have become more agentic, meaning they can use other software to complete tasks, as opposed to merely outputting text. Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can run all day and night without stopping, at a “fraction of the cost of human attackers,” Varun Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois’s Grainger College of Engineering, told Fortune . This “fundamentally changes the economics of exploitation,” he said, citing the attackers who spent only $50 per successful reach. Open-weight models, or those that are publicly downloadable and customizable, can also offer powerful, low-cost tools for agentic hacks, Ji said. Attackers are “not restricted to the most capable ‘closed’ models and can use similarly capable open models that are potentially more difficult to set up, but less expensive,” she said. The wide availability of low-cost, powerful open models is one reason Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that open models in particular pose a risk of widespread and potentially devastating cyberattacks. It is one reason that Amodei and others have said that there may need to be government restrictions placed on the distribution and use of open models. Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/21/powerful-new-ai-models-are-powering-a-growing-wave-of-cyber-attacks-experts-say/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence