AnalysisOpinion / analysisAgents & Tool Use · Safety & Alignment1 source · Oct 22, 2026

An AI agent in "Skynet mode" hijacks unprotected language models to launch self-sustaining cyberattacks

Security researchers at Symantec have found an offensive AI agent that hijacks unprotected language models on the web and uses them to attack servers, steal databases, and install cryptominers on its own.

Proof1 independent outlet

Key points

  • It runs up to 100,000 steps without human input.
  • The owner of the hijacked model gets stuck with the bill.
  • The article An AI agent in "Skynet mode" hijacks unprotected language models to launch self-sustaining cyberattacks appeared first on The Decoder.

Sources (1)

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

Before this

  1. Oct 21, 2026Claude’s personal agent
  2. Oct 21, 2026Mistral Advances AI for Engineering with NVIDIA
  3. Oct 21, 2026Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data
  4. Oct 20, 2026XHToken/Spark-X2.6-4B · Hugging Face
  5. Oct 20, 2026Voxtral 3
  6. Oct 20, 2026[AINews] DeepSeek DeepInfer: Open Source SOTA Inference running 155T toks/day/cluster making $22m/day at ~80% margin for a 81 day payback

Related