French
AI | 12.15.2025, 02:07 pm — Shailesh Jadhav
For €15 an hour, an AI agent outperforms human hackers, study shows
An artificial intelligence (AI) agent outperformed most human hackers after it spent 16 hours crawling a university’s site for vulnerabilities, a new study has found.
The study comes as hackers from Russia, North Korea, Iran and Chinese-backed groups are using large language models (LLMs) to refine cyberattacks, according to Microsoft and OpenAI this year. Militant groups such as pro-Islamic State groups are also experimenting with AI to mount attacks.
Stanford University found that its newly developed ARTEMIS AI agent came second out of ten in an experiment with human hackers. Researchers said their AI agent “demonstrated technical sophistication,” comparable to the strongest human participants in the study.
Running the ARTEMIS AI agent costs only $18 ( around €15) an hour compared to the $60 (€52) hourly rates of a “professional penetration tester,” the report read. The study has yet to be published in an official research journal.
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