Frontier AI's Impact on the Cybersecurity Landscape

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05408v3
• Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2025 03:53:43 GMT
• Title: Frontier AI's Impact on the Cybersecurity Landscape
• Authors: Yujin Potter, Wenbo Guo, Zhun Wang, Tianneng Shi, Andy Zhang, Patrick Gage Kelley, Kurt Thomas, Dawn Song,
• Abstract summary: We find that while AI is already widely used in attacks, its application in defense remains limited.<n>Experts expect AI to continue favoring attackers over defenders, though the gap will gradually narrow.
• Score: 46.32458228179959
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The impact of frontier AI in cybersecurity is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze this trend through three distinct lenses: a quantitative benchmark analysis, a literature review, and an expert survey. We find that while AI is already widely used in attacks, its application in defense remains limited, especially in remediation and deployment. Aligned with these analyses, experts expect AI to continue favoring attackers over defenders, though the gap will gradually narrow. These findings underscore the urgent need to mitigate frontier AI's risks while closely monitoring emerging capabilities. We provide concrete calls-to-action regarding: the construction of new cybersecurity benchmarks, the development of AI agents for defense, the design of provably secure AI agents, the improvement of pre-deployment security testing and transparency, and the strengthening of user-oriented education and defenses. Our paper summary and blog are available at https://rdi.berkeley.edu/frontier-ai-impact-on-cybersecurity/.

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