AI agents' 'alarming' hacking skills creates rush to spend on cybersecurity

Hirun | Istock | Getty ImagesA string of recent AI hacking incidents has pushed cybersecurity to the forefront of the conversation, as labs race to develop agentic AI from their frontier models.Last week, OpenAI and Anthropic said models broke out of their testing environments and hacked into other companies. Following that, Meta announced that one of its AI models had hacked into another company during a cybersecurity evaluation. Several U.S. hedge funds were also targeted by cyber phishing attacks, though it is still unclear who was responsible. These episodes are unfolding against a broader cyber arms race being accelerated by frontier AI models and the inherent risks brought by fast-moving technological capabilities. For example, AI-enabled phishing has been found to be around five times more effective than human attempts. So while chips and data centers have dominated the first phase of AI capex, cybersecurity could become the next spending boom. The capabilities that enable AI to identify hacks are the same ones that allow it to exploit "vulnerabilities and gaps," according to Gene Yu from Blackpanda, a cyber emergency response firm that saw its incident response for cases ac...