This is partly because they can partially automate their attacks, including by means of artificial intelligence,” the Netherlands Defence Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its annual report for 2025. The warning lands at a particularly anxious moment for the cybersecurity community. A powerful new AI model developed by Anthropic called Mythos — feared to outperform humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities — has experts worried that, once widely available, it could give malicious actors an unprecedented ability to punch through critical IT infrastructure.

Its developers are currently restricting access to a limited group of technology firms and unnamed organizations while they assess the security risks. AI allows hackers to strike faster and at greater scale than traditional methods — compressing what once took hours of manual work into seconds, and enabling more simultaneous attacks across more targets. Generative AI also enables highly convincing phishing emails, voice cloning and deepfake videos that can bypass security checks that rely on human intuition. Cybersecurity specialists are also using AI to monitor networks and flag unusual behavior faster than any human analyst could.