Crypto hackers are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to scan DeFi protocols for bugs, risking multi-million-dollar payouts as attackers stand to reap substantial rewards. AI is making hacking cheaper, easier, and faster, enabling attackers to overwhelm defenders and potentially steal large sums. Offensive capacity is improving far faster than defensive tooling, according to veteran DeFi builders, underscoring the growing danger in the space. Bad actors are now using large language models powering AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to search thousands of lines of code per second, with the explicit aim of identifying vulnerabilities developers and auditors may have missed.
AI has made legacy-contract hunting cheaper, faster, and more scalable, particularly for old forks, dusty deployments, under-maintained vaults, and inherited code paths. As one security executive noted, “AI does not need to invent novel vulnerability classes to create more damage; it only needs to find old ones faster and at scale.” Accelerating AI growth, fuelled by record levels of funding for top companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, is rapidly reshuffling the crypto industry. What was once a hypothetical risk posed by AI less than a year ago has quickly become a stark reality.
The problem now is that bad actors are further ahead in utilising the technology than those tasked with securing the $130 billion DeFi ecosystem. “Offensive capacity is improving far faster than defensive tooling.” While evidence suggests attackers are using AI to speed up and scale their attacks, crypto security firms and auditors are only just starting to incorporate the technology into their defences. The situation has spooked even the most veteran DeFi developers.
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