After years of misfires, artificial-intelligence hacking tools have become dangerously good. So good that they are even surpassing some human hackers, according to a novel experiment conducted recently at Stanford University. A Stanford team spent a good chunk of the past year tinkering with an AI bot called Artemis. It takes a similar approach to Chinese hackers who had been using Anthropic’s generative AI software to break into major corporations and foreign governments. Artemis scans the network, finds potential bugs—software vulnerabilities—and then finds ways to exploit them. Then the Stanford researchers let Artemis out of the lab, using it to find bugs in a real-world computer network—the one used by Stanford’s own engineering department. And to make things interesting, they pitted Artemis against real-world professional hackers, known as penetration testers.

Full study : A recent Stanford experiment shows what happens when an artificial-intelligence hacking bot is unleashed on a network.