AI-Built Zero-Day Nearly Powered Mass Attack

Google Says Criminals Used AI to Discover and Code Exploit Rashmi Ramesh (rashmiramesh_) • May 12, 2026

A cybercriminal group came close to launching a mass attack earlier this year, armed with a software exploit that an artificial intelligence model had built from scratch, said Google researchers.

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Google's Threat Intelligence Group's disclosure of a criminal operation deploying a working zero-day where the exploit code is AI-generated is different from other reports about AI-generated vulnerabilities.

Google said it worked with the affected vendor to patch the flaw before the attack could be launched, though it did not name the vendor or the tool. The flaw itself was a bypass of two-factor authentication embedded in a Python script targeting a popular open-source web administration tool.

The vulnerability was not the kind that conventional security scanners are built ...