At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto

Using AI models to generate exploits for cryptocurrency contract flaws appears to be a promising business model, though not necessarily a legal one. Researchers with University College London (UCL) and the University of Sydney (USYD) in Australia have devised an AI agent that can autonomously discover and exploit vulnerabilities in so-called smart contracts. Smart contracts, which have never lived up to their name, are self-executing programs on various blockchains that carry out decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions when certain conditions are met. A system like A1 can turn a profit Like most programs of sufficient complexity, smart contracts have bugs, and exploiting those bugs to steal funds can be remunerative. Last year, the cryptocurrency industry lost almost $1.5 billion to hacking attacks, according to Web3 security platform vendor Immunefi [PDF]. Since 2017, crims have pilfered around $11.74 billion from DeFi platforms. And it looks like AI agents can make taking those funds even easier. Arthur Gervais, professor in information security at UCL, and Liyi Zhou, a lecturer in computer science at USYD, have developed an AI agent system called A1 that uses various AI models from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, and Alibaba (Qwen) to develop exploits for Solidity smart contracts. They describe the system in a preprint paper titled, "AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation." Given a set of target parameters – the blockchain, contract address, and block number – the agent ch...