Google Reports Hackers Used A.I. to Discover Software Flaw

Google said a criminal hacking group recently attempted to launch a widespread cyberattack that relied on artificial intelligence to detect a previously unknown bug in software. The company published research on the incident Monday and stated it marked the first time it had identified hackers using A.I. to discover such a flaw.

The report said the company had high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an A.I. model to support the discovery and weaponization of the vulnerability. Google did not disclose when the thwarted attack occurred, whom it targeted or which A.I. platform the hackers used.

The company added that it did not believe the hackers used its own Gemini chatbot. The attempted attack represents a development that security experts have anticipated for years. The company described the incident as a taste of what is to come in the evolving intersection of A.I. and cybersecurity.

Flaws like the one identified by Google and the hacking group are known as zero-day vulnerabilities. These are security holes unknown to the software makers. They were once considered rare and powerful enough to fetch millions of dollars on black markets used to sell hacking tools.

Security experts have feared for years that malicious hackers could eventually rely on A.I. models to identify undisclosed flaws in computer code. Such tools could launch attacks that are difficult to guard against. That concern had remained largely theoretical until the incident reported by Google.