AI Discovers Vulnerabilities Worth ¥690 Million in Smart Contracts, Hopes for Defensive Applications Rise: Report

Anthropic announced on the first of the month that their research demonstrates the capability of AI agents to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain-based smart contracts. The study involved the creation of a benchmark known as 'SCONE-bench', which includes 405 smart contracts that were actually exploited between 2020 and 2025. An evaluation using ten types of frontier AI models showed that 207 cases (51.11%) were successfully attacked. The total amount stolen in a simulated environment reached $550.1 million (approximately ¥82.5 billion). However, this total includes amounts learned during the AI's training phase...