'Act now': Five Eyes warns that AI models specialized for cyber attacks are only months away
Five Eyes alliance warned frontier GenAI models will enable advanced cyberattacks against businesses and governments within monthsStatement stressed cyber risk is now a leadership and business continuity issue, requiring whole‑of‑society responseComes amid concerns over Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and other models already showing offensive potential despite guardrails
In just a few months, high-end Generative Artificial Intelligence models (GenAI) will be capable of running cyberattacks on big businesses and government organizations, Five Eyes is warning.
The Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Formed after the Second World War, it allows the five countries to closely cooperate on intelligence and matters of national security.
Earlier this week, Five Eyes issued a new warning, saying that AI will help improve cyber defense over time, but will also accelerate the speed, scale, and sophistication, of threats: “Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months,” the warning reads. “In this environment, cyber resilience is integral to advancing business continuity, market confidence, and long-term value.”
All hands on deck
Five Eyes is now saying that the industry needs all hands on deck to address what’s increasingly becoming a burning issue:
“A whole-of-organisation and whole-of-society response is required,” it said. “Cyber risk can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue. This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility.”
In early April, news broke that Anthropic’s latest AI model, Mythos Preview, was so good at exploiting software vulnerabilities, that the company could not release it to the public. Instead, it only shared it with a handful of US enterprises, to give them a head start against threat actors.
While skeptics said it was nothing more than a publicity stunt, similar to what OpenAI pulled off with ChatGPT 2.0, companies that used it (for example, Mozilla), confirmed that it was, indeed, powerful enough that it needs to be kept in check.
Even models available today, despite all the guardrails, are being regularly leveraged by bad actors in different cyberattack scenarios.
