{"id":192973,"date":"2026-03-05T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/05\/how-our-ai-bots-are-ignoring-their-programming-and-giving-hackers-superpowers\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T06:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T11:30:12","slug":"how-our-ai-bots-are-ignoring-their-programming-and-giving-hackers-superpowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/05\/how-our-ai-bots-are-ignoring-their-programming-and-giving-hackers-superpowers\/","title":{"rendered":"How our AI bots are ignoring their programming and giving hackers superpowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

How our AI bots are ignoring their programming and giving hackers superpowers<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/story\/2026-03-05\/how-our-ai-bots-are-ignoring-their-programming-giving-hackers-superpowers<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-05 06:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.latimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers. A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers. The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls. Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime. According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers\u2019 digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said. The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons. They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to \u201cjailbreak\u201d the chatbot to assist them. When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected. The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.AI \u201cdoesn\u2019t sleep,\u201d Curtis Simpson, chief executive of Gambit Security, said in a blog post. \u201cIt collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.\u201d \u201cNo amount of prevention investment would have made this attack impossible,\u201d he said. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. It told Bloomberg that it had banned the accounts involved and disrupted their activity after an investigation.OpenAI said it is aware of the attack campaign carried out using Anthropic\u2019s models against the Mexican government agencies. \u201cWe also identified other attempts by the adversary to use our models for activities that violate our usage policies; our models refused to comply with these attempts,\u201d an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cWe have banned the accounts used by this adversary and value the outreach from Gambit Security.\u201dInstances of generative AI-assisted hacking are on the rise, and the threat of cyberattacks from bots acting on their own is no longer science fiction. With AI doing their bidding, novices can cause damage in moments, while experienced hackers can launch many more sophisticated attacks with much less effort. Earlier this year, Amazon discovered that a low-skilled hacker used commercially available AI to breach 600 firewalls. Another took control of thousands of DJI robot vacuums with help from Claude, and was able to access live video feed, audio and floor plans of strangers.\u201cThe kinds of things we\u2019re seeing today are only the early signs of the kinds of things that AIs will be able to do in a few years,\u201d said Nikola Jurkovic, an expert working on reducing risks from advanced AI. \u201cSo we need to urgently prepare.\u201dLate last year, Anthropic warned that society has reached an \u201cinflection point\u201d in AI use in cybersecurity after disrupting what the company said was a Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign that used Claude to infiltrate 30 global targets, including financial institutions and government agencies.Generative AI also has been used to extort companies, create realistic online profiles by North Korean operatives to secure jobs in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, run romance scams and operate a network of Russian propaganda accounts.Over the last few years, AI models have gone from being able to manage tasks lasting only a few seconds to today\u2019s AI agents working autonomously for many hours. AI\u2019s capability to complete long tasks is doubling every seven months. \u201cWe just don\u2019t actually know what is the upper limit of AI\u2019s capability, because no one\u2019s made benchmarks that are difficult enough so the AI can\u2019t do them,\u201d said Jurkovic, who works at METR, a nonprofit that measures AI system capabilities to cause catastrophic harm to society.So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering. Large language models are used to write convincing emails to dupe people out of their money, causing an eight-fold increase in complaints from older Americans as they lost $4.9 billion in online fraud in 2025.\u201cThe messages used to elicit a click from the target can now be generated on a per-user basis more efficiently and with fewer tell-tale signs of phishing,\u201d such as grammatical and spelling errors, said Cliff Neuman, an associate professor of computer science at USC.AI companies have been responding using AI to detect attacks, audit code and patch vulnerabilities.\u201cUltimately, the big imbalance stems from the need of the good-actors to be secure all the time, and of the bad-actors to be right only once,\u201d Neuman said. The stakes around AI are rising as it infiltrates every aspect of the economy. Many are concerned that there is insufficient understanding of how to ensure it cannot be misused by bad actors or nudged to go rogue.Even those at the top of the industry have warned users about the potential misuse of AI. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has long advocated that the AI systems being built are unpredictable and difficult to control. These AIs have shown behaviors as varied as deception and blackmail, to scheming and cheating by hacking software.Still, major AI companies \u2014 OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google \u2014 signed contracts with the U.S. government to use their AIs in military operations. This last week, the Pentagon directed federal agencies to phase out Claude after the company refused to back down on its demand that it wouldn\u2019t allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. \u201cThe AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,\u201d Amodei told CBS News.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How our AI bots are ignoring their programming and giving hackers superpowers https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/story\/2026-03-05\/how-our-ai-bots-are-ignoring-their-programming-giving-hackers-superpowers Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":192974,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ca-times.brightspotcdn.com\/dims4\/default\/2852737\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/6240x3276+0+442\/resize\/1200x630!\/quality\/75\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F21%2Fdd%2F8f67f7644f8f9c167a965420c80a%2Fgettyimages-2243444761.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,20,30,24,31,35,25],"class_list":["post-192973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-breach","tag-cybersecurity","tag-exploit","tag-hacker","tag-phishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192975,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192973\/revisions\/192975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}