AI doesn’t care whose side you’re on
AI boosts productivity for everyone, including attackers. In this case, the technology augmented the human security research team’s efforts, enabling them to identify a weakness in Apple’s security system. This won’t be the first time AI gets used to identify hard-to-find bugs and certainly won’t be the last.
This should be a real concern to any platform provider, as it means the most well-resourced attackers will be leaning deep into AI to help them find vulnerabilities. And as AI improves, the capacity it provides will inevitably become more dangerous.
That’s even before you consider that some attackers work for the kind of state and state-adjacent entities that can afford aircraft carriers.
When nation-states come knocking
Access to such extensive resources means future AI-augmented attacks will have at their disposal the most powerful computational AI money can buy, which probably boils down to quantum computers.
