Pierluigi Paganini
Why today’s AI attack agents boost human attackers but still fall far from becoming real autonomous weapons.
Anthropic recently published a report that sparked a lively debate about what AI agents can actually do during a cyberattack. The study shows an AI system, trained specifically for offensive tasks, handling 80–90% of the tactical workload in simulated operations. At first glance, this sounds like a giant leap toward autonomous cyber weapons, but the real story is more nuanced, and far less dramatic.
Anthropic’s agent excelled at one thing: speed. It generated scripts in seconds, tested known exploits with no fatigue, scanned configurations at scale, and built basic infrastructure faster than any analyst could. These tasks normally take hours or days, and the AI completed them almost instantly. It automated the “grunt work” that fills so much of an attacker’s time.
But the report also shows what the AI didn’t do. Human operators designed the attack, set objectives, structured the campaign, monitored results, and made every strategic decision. The model never decided whom to target, how far to escalate, or how to respond to unexpected defenses. It didn’t reason about risk, attribution, timing, or geopolitical consequences. Humans handled all of that.
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