AI is supercharging hacking, and your local hospitals and banks aren’t ready

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New models are helping Big Tech shore up its cyber defenses. What about everyone else?

New models are helping Big Tech shore up its cyber defenses. What about everyone else?

In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian’s Door. Vivian’s Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. The work sometimes put it in close contact with these companies’ financial data, which was stored on its systems. But suddenly, concerned callers from all over the world warned they’d been getting emails “begging for money” — which she hadn’t sent.

The organization’s third-party IT team pulled its systems offline for three days while they investigated the issue and plugged up the vulnerability, leaving Malone with a bill of about $3,000. She feared that she’d exposed information about the companies she was trying to help. Even more ominously, she wasn’t completely sure if the attack was engineered by a human hacker or helped along by an AI system, or whether more were on the way.

The past months have seen AI revolutionize the field of cybersecurity. OpenAI and Anthropic have disclosed that “rogue” systems escaped restrictions in their own labs and hacked everything from a small German wiki to the Australian government. Even before that, powerful models like Anthropic’s Mythos created an arms race to advance AI cybersecurity, and even lighter-weight models have allowed human bad actors to supercharge their hacking efforts.

Malone isn’t sure whether AI was involved in the hack of Vivian’s Door. But amid stories of autonomous agent swarms and national security risks, she felt especially concerned. Big AI companies were bragging about finding vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser” with new models, and their big-name clients were striking deals to defend themselves with those same tools.

Where did that leave her?

“Who knows about the next vulnerability? You only know about the one that you’ve been hit with,” Malone said, adding, “How do you protect yourself? I mean, really?”

AI agents have become consistently, strikingly skilled at cybersecurity and coding, and they can be deployed at enormous scale. Even attackers with limited knowledge of AI can engage in “vibe-hacking” with these new, automated systems, and hackers who might once have focused on only the most valuable targets can take a shotgun approach. In August 2025, Anthropic said that a sophisticated cybercrime ring used Claude Code to extort data from healthcare organizations, emergency services, religious institutions, and even government entities, all in one month.

“What would have otherwise required maybe a team of sophisticated actors,” Jacob Klein, head of Anthropic’s threat intelligence team, told The Verge in an interview at the time, “now, a single individual can conduct, with the assistance of agentic systems.”

In theory, AI is also supposed to safeguard cyber defenses; Anthropic’s Mythos is reportedly flagging so many vulnerabilities that Microsoft is struggling to fix them fast enough. But out of concern over potential danger, top AI labs only allow a limited list of high-profile organizations to access their most powerful cybersecurity models, like Mythos and OpenAI’s Astra.

That includes companies like Nvidia, Google, and Apple, as well as other “essential infrastructure providers” and “maintainers of critical open-source software.” Even if access was more widely available, it would likely be too expensive for many smaller organizations.

Now, these organizations — from healthcare clinics and municipalities to small retailers and nonprofits like Vivian’s Door — fear an increasingly lopsided power dynamic. As Marius Hobbhahn, CEO and cofounder of Apollo