How Long Until AI Hacks Everything?

The Australian government has been scrambling since the revelation that, earlier this year, it was hacked.

At the United Nations General Assembly last month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shared that OpenAI models had, of their own accord, accessed private data from the nation’s Medicare database—in addition to probing or seeking to infiltrate at least three other government agencies.

Just this week, Australian lawmakers grilled OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon over the incident: “If you hadn’t voluntarily provided that information to government, we still wouldn’t know today?” Senator Jonathon Duniam asked .

“What you say is a reasonable conclusion,” Kwon replied.

Meanwhile, the country’s government is steeling itself for a future of AI-powered hacks: The Australian Department of Home Affairs has ordered all government agencies to, within the next six months, identify legacy IT systems and establish a plan to phase them out.

In a world in which “frontier AI capabilities have targeted the Commonwealth’s technology,” the home-affairs secretary wrote, such software poses “an unacceptable risk to the Australian Government.” Australia is just one of the nations, associations, and private companies bracing for a wave of AI-powered hacks.

Criminals and state-sponsored intelligence groups are now using the technology to execute cyberattacks with greater speed, scale, and sophistication—including hyper-personalized phishing emails and automated intrusions.

As a result, the number of cybersecurity vulnerabilities disclosed each month has doubled since the start of the year, according to research by Google’s Threat Intelligence Group. [ Read: A startling glimpse at AI’s ruthless efficiency ] In response, IT teams are scrambling to shore up their defenses.

“It’s a matter of months, or maybe a year, in which the task of securing the software foundation of civilization will have to be solved,” Stanislav Fort, a former Anthropic researcher who is now the chief scientist at the cybersecurity firm AISLE, told me.

And AI is not only making cyberattacks more effective but also increasing the surface area worth hacking.

Breaking into a website or executing a ransomware attack takes time, Fort said, so hackers have traditionally chosen large targets with sizable payoffs.

But cheap, tireless hacking agents mean any organization or person might be worth targeting.

At the same time, the cybersecurity professionals I spoke with were confident they could rise to the occasion.

“If we step up our game in cybersecurity, as a field, we can definitely meet the challenge stemming from AI,” Fort said.