 In the Terminator movies, the grand finale is often a robot-on-robot fight to the death. That is happening in real life as well – except it is not always the good robot that wins. Artificial intelligence is the most powerful digital tool ever created. Now a disturbing breakthrough in criminal enterprise has emerged: using one AI system to hack another. At stake is the security of nearly everything – personal identities, bank accounts, and perhaps soon every commercial and government activity secured by blockchain, not to mention trillions of dollars of value stored in cryptocurrency. Nilesh Christopher of The Los Angeles Times reports that Gambit, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, revealed last month that hackers used Anthropic’s Claude AI system to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government computers. The heist exposed the personal information associated with roughly 195 million identities (some duplicates) drawn from nine Mexican agencies – including tax records, vehicle registrations, birth certificates, and property ownership data. Claude is designed to resist exactly this kind of abuse. Anthropic, like other AI companies, maintains teams dedicated to stress-testing their chatbots and probing them for weaknesses. But AI can do almost anything faster and better – including hacking. Gambit found that the attackers were able to “jailbreak” Claude with the help of another AI: OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The second system reportedly analyzed Claude and helped reveal the credentials needed to weaponize it. This development threatens the foundations of emerging AI-driven and blockchain-based systems. Curtis Simpson told Christopher that because AI “doesn’t sleep … it collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.” In other words, cybercrime no longer requires a digital army of hackers hunched over laptops in Shanghai or Tirana, fueled by endless supplies of Club-Mate and Cheetos. With the right prompts, AI can attack a problem relentlessly – probing, testing, and refining its methods until it succeeds. And the target surface is growing. With the consolidation of Americans’ personal data from dozens of federal agencies under the Trump administration, AI-enabled hackers may soon be able to dip into one enormous resource instead of many smaller ones. As blockchain systems spread across finance and government, expect AI tools to become not just powerful allies – but dangerous adversaries to one another. This development suggests a growing need for startups with deeper expertise in the cyberdefense of AI. It also suggests that for all the contributions of the Ph.D. philosopher hired by Anthropic to instill a sense of ethics in Claude, gaps still remain. Companies might want to look to the world of science-fiction and devise commandments as strict as Isaac Azimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics[A1],” designed to prevent robots from harming humans. Only in this case, such rules would prevent AI from harming other AI systems – and the rest of us in the process. Comments are closed.
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